Learning to Accept Pain: Not All Pain Has a Purpose
By: Jamila Gomez
We’ve all heard the sayings. “Everything happens for a reason.” “There’s purpose in the pain.” “This is just a lesson in disguise.” These phrases get tossed around like lifelines, especially when someone is going through it. But let’s be real: sometimes pain has no grand design. Sometimes it’s just pain. It’s not always a sign. It’s not always a test. And no, it’s not always a setup for something better.
Some pain is senseless. Some pain is caused by other people’s cruelty, carelessness, or unchecked power. Some pain is the byproduct of systems that were never meant to protect you in the first place. And trying to assign purpose to it—to spiritualize it, moralize it, or explain it away—can leave you feeling more confused than comforted. Especially when you’re already hurting.
There’s a quiet violence in telling people their suffering is meaningful when they haven’t been given the space to feel the weight of it. When they haven’t had the chance to say, “This shouldn’t have happened.” When the wound is still fresh and someone tries to slap a purpose on it like a Band-Aid. Sometimes we do this to ourselves, too. We scramble to make sense of what broke us because the thought of it being meaningless feels worse than the pain itself.
So we force meaning onto it. We tell ourselves, “Maybe I needed that to grow,” even when deep down, we’re not sure we believe it. And while it’s true that growth can come from pain, that doesn’t mean the pain had to happen in order for growth to be possible. That’s the distinction we don’t talk about enough.
We like to call pain a teacher. And yes, there are times it does teach us something—about ourselves, about the people around us, about what we will no longer accept. But there are also times when pain doesn’t teach anything. It just lingers. It disrupts. It steals. It silences. And the pressure to find meaning in those moments can feel like yet another burden to carry. The truth is, not every hurt has wisdom on the other side of it. Some pain just needs to be felt. Witnessed. Survived. We don’t need to tie a bow around every breakdown. We don’t need to alchemize every ache into a breakthrough. That’s hustle culture spirituality dressed up as healing.
Here’s where it shifts. While pain doesn’t always have a purpose, you can choose what to do with it. That doesn’t mean you’re obligated to “turn your pain into power” the way social media loves to glorify. It just means that somewhere in the aftermath—when the dust settles, when the sting dulls—you get to decide how this pain will or won’t shape you. You get to ask: Do I want to carry this forward, or set it down? What do I need to unlearn from this experience? Who am I now that this pain has passed through me? None of those questions rush the healing. They honor the fact that something happened, and you’re still here. That’s it. That’s enough.
Not every storm is followed by a rainbow. Some things don’t get wrapped up with clarity or closure. And that doesn’t mean you failed to “find the lesson.” It means you’re human. So if you’re in a season where you’re asking why—why this happened, why it hurts, why nothing makes sense—know this: you don’t have to give your pain a purpose it never asked for. You don’t have to find beauty in what broke you. Some pain just is. And surviving it is more than enough.
YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:
