The last few days I’ve been catching up on reading blogs more than on writing my own. Several of the blogs that I follow are related to adoption. I’ve learned over the years that my experiences as an adoptee were not so unusual as I had thought, and many adoptees have had it much worse.

But here is the thing that strikes me tonight about some of these stories. There is such a deep need for us to invalidate someone else’s pain in order to validate our own. What does this come from? The mother who gives up a baby suffers. The woman who cannot give birth to a child suffers. The child who is torn from one family suffers, even if placed in a new family that does its best to love and care for her. The child whose own genetic parents raise him in an environment of terror or neglect, suffers.

Why must we rate or rank these types of pain? Why must I feel that my pain is less if you do not acknowledge it was worse than yours? Why must I say that your suffering was nothing since it was of a different type than my own? And why must we believe that we must choose between grief and gratitude? Surely every life gives many justifications for both. To say “you should be grateful” should not mean “your pain is invalid.” Your pain and your joy both have meaning, or not, equally.

Years ago, I read a book in which a psychiatrist wrote this:

“…a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is put into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus, suffering fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.”

This man was not just a psychiatrist — he was a Jewish psychiatrist in Germany who spent much of WWII in a concentration camp. He escaped death partly because of his profession, but largely just by chance. His credentials as a sufferer can hardly be questioned His name was Viktor Frankl, and his book — Man’s Search for Meaning — is one of the great and largely unappreciated books that I have read in my life.

I no longer make a lot of grand philsophical or religious statements. Damned if I know who or what God is, or what we are supposed to be doing. But I do think that we suffer for a reason, in some sense.

And I think, perhaps, when we learn to respect our own suffering, and the suffering of others, without trying to rank or rate or qualify it — when we have compassion toward those in pain regardless of the type or source of the pain — when we can feel joy without believing our pain or anyone else’s is invalidated by it — perhaps our suffering has served its purpose.