Does Suffering Build Character?

 

Last week I was thrown out of Shepton Community Bookshop.

When I say, ‘thrown out’, it would be more accurate to say ‘gently advised that I was getting over-emotional and it might be a good idea to go for a walk in the park to calm down’.  SCB is a gentle, laid-back second-hand bookshop where they’ve always got time to chat with customers who just want somewhere to sit down or somewhere to listen to them.

In that bookshop, I met some of the best friends I’ve made since moving to Somerset.  One is the Dungeon Master who gave me the chance both to play Dungeons & Dragons and to join a writers’ group, which were two things I had wanted to do for a long time – in the case of role-playing games, ever since PDB11 introduced me to the webcomic Darths & Droids.  Another is TyrannosaurusHood88, whom I met when he came into the shop to tell us about the crossover fanfiction he was writing.

So, generally, Shepton Community Bookshop is a good place to be, and this visit started off well.  I donated some books, said hello to some of the other customers, and helped a family with small children find the picture-books section, on the set of low shelves immediately by the window.

Unfortunately, once the other customers had gone, I started angsting about things I had found in a couple of books that I was browsing through.  One, discussing suffering, was by a writer describing caring for his wife through a long illness.  I thought it might give me some perspective on how it feels for PDB11 trying to support me in my depression – and perhaps, if I’d been calmer, it might have done.

From my browsing, though, it seemed to be arguing that suffering builds character, and that, when bad things happen to good people, they become better people.  So presumably, I thought, if bad experiences just turn us into scared, pessimistic people, it proves we weren’t good people to start with, and therefore deserve to suffer.

I put this book down, and picked up a second one, which was about how to be happy.  Somehow I found this even more frustrating, because the author didn’t start off by explaining why it’s all right to want to be happy.  After all, if suffering develops our character the way exercise develops our bodies and studying develops our brains, we ought to be scheduling ourselves several hours of misery per day, every day, shouldn’t we?  It was at this point that I started ranting at God, and was asked to leave.

After taking a week to calm down, I think that the people who say, ‘suffering builds character’ probably don’t mean it the way it sounds to me.  Probably all they mean is that times of unhappiness will come to all of us, and that we shouldn’t expect life always to be easy, or feel guilty about not always being happy.

But people suffering from long-term depression, like me, already know that life can be difficult.  My problem is more that, since I was a child, I have expected life to be impossible (and therefore didn’t try).  Far from feeling guilty about being unhappy, I grew up assuming that pain was inherently virtuous, and that if I wasn’t currently being kicked and punched by school bullies, I needed to beat myself just to stay in practice. 

In September 2015 I finally gave up physically self-harming.  After a year, I held a party to celebrate.  But what has been far harder is giving up tormenting myself mentally and emotionally.

Some people assume that it is fine to avoid physical pain, but that mental suffering is always there to teach us something, and should be welcomed.  But perhaps we should regard them both the same way, as a messaging system to tell us when something is wrong.

For example, if I get a headache, I don’t want to take painkillers until I know what the cause of it is (dehydration?  lack of sleep?  migraine?  fractured skull?) and how to solve the problem (do I need a glass of water and a few hours’ sleep, or should I go to the hospital to be X-rayed?).  If I have an identified injury (say, a broken foot), I want to take enough pain-relief that I can sleep, but not so much that I forget that I’m injured and try to go for an 18-mile walk.  If I have pain from something that isn’t an injury (say, a period cramp), then taking painkillers makes sense.

Why shouldn’t we treat emotions the same way?  If I feel vaguely unhappy or dissatisfied with life, I need to work out what is wrong (is there something I should be doing with my life and am not, or is it just that my expectations are unreasonable?).  If I feel sad about something specific that has happened to me, I need to see it in perspective (yes, it was bad, but it’s not the whole story and doesn’t mean that I have to spend my life grieving over it).  But if I’m plagued by paranoid thoughts that I know are irrational, I need to remind myself that they’re not true, and, if necessary, take an antipsychotic tablet.

I used to think that what we experienced after death was the opposite of our Earthly lives: those who had been happy would be punished in Hell, while those who had been miserable would be rewarded in Heaven.

Now, though, I think that this life is a stage in training ourselves to be the people we will be for all eternity (and that the learning process continues after death).  If I deliberately make myself miserable, I turn myself into someone who couldn’t enjoy Heaven if I was there, and would spoil it for everyone else.  So in the next post, I will consider what might be better ways to build character.