David Davis

an interlude on pain tolerance

When I suffer, my panic shapes itself like this: Fuck, that hurts! This must mean that my pain tolerance is gone! Fuck! What will I do without it? If I can’t manage pain, then I will be in pain—and what’s worse than that? In those moments, my suffering is primarily derived from a pain that doesn’t yet exist. Suffering is time travel, the opposite of mindfulness. (Craving some takeout? We have perfectly good pain at home!)

The other night, my first-ever UTI knocked me so hard on my ass I was daydreaming about 10g needles. 25 of them, hell, even 50, couldn’t be as bad as this. What I would do to trade one discomfort for another! Funny how my brain goes, We prefer this pain and not, We prefer no pain.

It doesn’t hurt, I said to Jade, who was driving me for emergency antibiotics. But it’s still unbearable.

That’s pain, she said decisively. I wondered if she said that because she knew it would make me feel better.

After one sleepless, excruciating night, the antibiotics have basically fixed everything, and now the pain—or whatever it was—is not even a memory. It’s just gone. But while it was here, I tolerated it. What other choice did I have?

I’ve clung to a certain idea of pain tolerance for a long time, associating it with power, endurance, and self-control; in my mind, it’s something that can be enhanced with conditioning, and weakened with neglect (that is, going too long without getting your ass kicked). But this isn’t true, or at least, that which promotes a higher pain tolerance is still up for debate, scientifically speaking. To speak anecdotally, some of my experiences have made me less tolerant of certain sensations; and while over the years, the needles have gotten bigger, the scenes more varied, the risks more risky, I’m also less likely to take just any kind of punishment just because I can. It turns out that I was wrong: pain tolerance is not unidirectional, linear, or static, and it is situational, circumstantial, and subjective. Once again, I’ve mixed up my moralizing with my biopsychosocial processes, and to my own detriment.

At any rate, pain tolerance isn’t a very useful concept for nonconsensual suffering, is it? Whether or not you can tolerate the pain doesn’t dictate whether you will encounter it (and of course you will, for you are alive in a body). Your pain tolerance may have something to say about how long your life will be, of course, and pain management—a facet of emotional regulation—is a useful skill, indeed. But I have long thought of pain tolerance as a kind of strength-training for a consensual event, assuming that the sufferer in question (me) has the power to end the sensation. And yet we almost never do.

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