The Longing to Turn Pain Into Something Beautiful

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

I, like most people, I think, treat pain like a problem to solve quickly. Isn’t it in our nature to escape discomfort when possible? Fix it, frame it, or file it away before anyone notices we’re struggling. For me, if I could turn the hurt into a lesson or a line in an essay or a reason to be stronger, I thought I could stay in control.

It’s not a bad impulse; not all bad, at any rate. Apart from seeking comfort, we’re also meaning-making creatures. We want our suffering to count for something.

But there’s an ache under that impulse. It’s a longing to turn pain into something meaningful or beautiful. It’s not just about surviving what hurts, but alchemizing it, justifying it, even redeeming it. Proving it wasn’t wasted.

That longing can be holy. And exhausting.

Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to a young poet in Letters to a Young Poet, said something that made me stop for a long time as I considered it. He wasn’t romanticizing pain or sadness. He was warning against the kind we perform for the crowd:

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

Unlived. Rejected. Lost.

I don’t think Rilke was saying “never be sad in front of people.” He was drawing out what happens when we use volume, busyness, or performance to somehow shortcut the grief instead of letting it move through us. Sadness doesn’t just vanish. It has a way of digging deep underground and compounding. (Busyness was my go to.)

Earlier in the same letter he offers the gentler, and harder, truth: the large sadnesses may have “gone right through you.” Maybe they changed you somewhere deep, in ways you couldn’t see while you were in the middle of them. Transformation is almost never a moment you remember like looking at a photograph. It’s almost always the slow work that you do as time passes.

That idea resonates well in an article written by John P. Weiss called “Let It Pass Through You.” In his elegant prose, he implies that sadness has to move through us if we are to deepen our connection with ourselves. If we repress it, we risk caging what he calls the bluebird, “that fragile and essential part of ourselves that longs to turn pain into something beautiful.”

This is the tension I keep living in:

Passage (let it through, let it change you) and longing (please, let this mean something).

Both can be true. The trouble starts when longing becomes a demand for an immediate payout. When we need the pain to be beautiful now so we don’t have to feel it as pain.

For a year, I’ve been exploring this idea of carrying weight, about motivation that dries up, about the grace of starting small when life refuses to give you a cinematic breakthrough. Those pieces come from the same place as this one.

The longing to turn pain into something beautiful is related to the longing to be seen as whole. If I can show you a polished moral, a tidy thesis, or a brave face, maybe I won’t have to sit with the mess. Maybe I won’t have to admit how scared I am sometimes.

But beauty that skips the middle is often just “packaging.” It can even become a kind of cruelty, aimed at ourselves: You shouldn’t still feel this. You should have learned by now. Turn it into content and move on.

That’s nothing more than shame and hustle grief.

What, then, is the beautiful thing, if it isn’t instant alchemy?

Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s a song that has a way of naming what you can’t say out loud, don’t have the words for, but somehow still makes you feel less alone.

Or maybe it’s in relationships. Maybe it’s how the edge drops out of your voice when you remember, suddenly, what it feels like to be misunderstood. Maybe it’s the patience you extend because you needed patience once and didn’t get it.

Sometimes it’s quiet integrity or showing up when you’re not motivated or doing the dishes because you don’t want to wake up to a messy kitchen. It might be choosing difficult honesty in a conversation that you could have easily kept superficial.

And sometimes the “beautiful” thing is just the truth without theater: telling someone you trust, “I’m not okay today,” without needing to say anything more.

None of that requires you to monetize or glamorize your pain. It doesn’t require you to be impressive, and it might not even require you to understand what the pain means yet.

Here’s what I’m trying to practice, mostly imperfectly:

• Let the sadness pass through. You can’t drown it. You have to give it room. I do this (sometimes) by journaling without an audience. I run. I sit with silence that I don’t fill with a podcast just to avoid my own thoughts.
• Separate longing from deadline. The desire for meaning is human. The demand for meaning on demand is a recipe for shame.
• Holding the bluebird gently. (I just learned this one.) The part of you that wants pain to become beauty isn’t your enemy. It’s a indication that you believe life is larger than whatever caused the pain. Just don’t ask that part to do all the emotional labor on day one.
• Stay suspicious of performed healing. If your healing only exists to be seen, you might be feeding the very noise Rilke warned about.

The world will keep selling us fast redemption: three steps, five habits, take this pill or that supplement, one morning routine that fixes your childhood; your broken marriage. I’m not against tools, but I am against the lie that you’re failing if you still ache.

For me, Rilke’s line about sadness that becomes “life that is unlived, rejected, lost” reads like a diagnosis. Weiss’s line about the bluebird reads like a hope.

Those things don’t contradict each other. They describe a kind of sequence:

First, let yourself live life, even the parts that hurt.

Then, over time, something else can emerge (if you let it). It won’t always be pretty and it will rarely happen on your timeline. Sometimes, it will be beautiful in the way truth sometimes is: plain, stubborn, and real.

If you carry the longing, maybe the kinder goal isn’t to force pain into beauty on contact.

Maybe it’s to stay hopeful and faithful enough, for long enough, for beauty to find you on the other side of passage.

Further reading (as cited above)

• Rainer Maria Rilke, *Letters to a Young Poet*
• John P. Weiss, “Let It Pass Through You,” Weiss Journal

The Music Carries The Weight of Everything

 

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember, orchestral movie scories have just hit different with me. One random Tuesday afternoon, shortly after I started my own business, I was sitting at my computer working through a complex issue for a client. I decided to go looking for a fresh batch of movie scores that I could build a “coding playlist” around. I stumbled on the work of Hans Zimmer (and others) for the “Pirates” movies.

“My Name Is Barbossa” (written by Geoff Zanelli) was the first piece to hit me on my new playlist.

My hands dropped into my lap. I sat back in my chair, and closed my eyes as the swells of music transported me right onto the deck of the “Black Pearl” standing next to Geoffrey Rush’s character whose hat always stays on his head no matter the fierceness of the wind.

Music seems to know that it’s always welcome to take up residence in my brain, rent free, as often as it likes, and music has a way of telling me the truth about what I’ve been sidestepping.

Barbossa’s theme does that for me every single time. So does “Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho.” In Barbossa’s theme, he strides into the frame like he owns the horizon, but the music gets there first. I don’t have the right words to describe it. The music carries the whole tragic majesty of his life—salt, shadow, greed, regret, sacrifice—and lays it all at his boots before he opens his mouth. He doesn’t have to explain himself. The score does it for him.

“Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho” closes “At World’s End” with Jack Sparrow sitting in a small dingy, his faithful compass pointing first at his rum then the place of the fountain of youth. Then, roll credits. That particular movie is jam-packed with powerful music, but the most incredible of all is relegated to the closing credits. I’ve written about this before. The whole sequence between 3:30 and 4:30 in that track blows my mind. I describe it to my wife as “music that breaks the heart and lifts the spirit.” I literally cried the first time I tried to explain it to her.

Then there’s Maverick—older now, and called on once again to do something impossible. There’s nothing mechanical about the way Captain Pete Mitchell flies. “Don’t think. Just do.” The music rises into something mythical. The instruments don’t highlight a moment; they tell you this is a man finishing a lifetime. A touchdown and a farewell in the same held breath. It’s strange. It’s the kind of music that convinces you that it’s okay to fly and fall apart at the same time.

It’s amazing how music does that! Words can circle something forever and still never get close. A chord hits and suddenly your whole soul remembers a story you didn’t realize you were carrying. I’ve spent months writing about emotions, but a few seconds of Hans Zimmer make all my essays look like they’re just getting started.

I’m not sure why this kind of music gets to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been drawn to people who arrive with more presence than volume. The ones who move through a room like their own theme is playing at a frequency only a few people pick up on.

I’ve met people like that. They’re the ones whose advice always comes softly, and whose example I often don’t appreciate until years later. They didn’t have swagger. They didn’t try to sell me their wisdom in pre-packaged courses for the low, low price of… whatever. They just lived in a way that made me rethink my own pace. I never knew what to call that quality until I realized they had their own kind of soundtrack. Not the big, heroic kind. More like a steady undercurrent you only notice when you choose to be quiet enough.

It makes me wonder if part of adulthood is learning to hear themes you used to miss.

I think about the way certain movie cues hit me. My brain remembers the feeling long before it remembers the scene. A piece of music rises and suddenly I’m not the age I am. It’s like I’m every version of myself at once. The kid who wanted to be brave. The teenager who didn’t know how to grieve. The young dad pretending exhaustion wasn’t catching up with him. The man trying not to break under a storm he refused to name.

Music doesn’t care about your timeline. It just tells you the truth.

And maybe that’s why these scores stay with me. They carry the weight I don’t have language for. They let me sit inside moments I’ve outgrown but never resolved. They remind me of who I wanted to be without scolding me for who I became.

Some days, when I don’t know what to feel or how to say it, I put on a soundtrack and let the strings sort it out. Zimmer does more for my emotional life in four minutes than I can do in a week of thinking.

I still don’t fully understand why certain notes undo me. Or why a fictional pirate can make me feel more human than a motivational podcast ever could. Or why the right chord progression makes everything in my chest line up like a flock of birds figuring out where to fly next.

But maybe I don’t need to understand it. Maybe the music knows the weight I’m carrying before I do. Maybe it holds it for me for a minute, long enough for something inside to settle.

For now, that feels like enough.

Do I Want to Die?

 

Photo by Joshua Chehov on Unsplash

I’m lying in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling tiles while I wait for the surgeon.

Metabolic disease stole my feet first. At least, that’s what the doctor called it. Neuropathy and poor circulation were the culprits. Except they weren’t. It was a slow cascade of small, ignorable decisions that compounded over decades. Now they’re deciding how much of my left leg, already dead below my knee, they’ll have to take.

I’ve carried oxygen with me everywhere I’ve gone for almost ten years. The tank sits idly on a chair in the corner while I listen to the constant hiss of the hospital oxygen supply coming from the cannula that irritates my nose and ears.

The last time I went to dinner with my family, my body wouldn’t fit between the bench-back and the booth table. The waitress, showing embarrassment on her face for me, moved us to a table in the center of the dining area. I set the oxygen tank in the chair next to me.

The chair where my wife used to sit.

She’s not there anymore. She sits alone in a memory care center, unable to remember any of the people she loves or who love her except for her father who has been gone for almost forty years. She cries for him every night like a small child frightened of the dark.

I’m waiting for the surgeon.

Except I’m not.

I’m 47 years old, sitting in my home office, drinking a diet soda while “Angelica” from “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” plays in my headphones. I’m not in a hospital bed. I have both legs, and I’m not on oxygen.

But I’m heavier; thirty-five pounds heavier than I was fifteen months ago.

For a while, I blamed the company I was working for. It sucked my will to live while I worked the kind of hours not even two separate shifts would cover. Then I left and started building something I love. A company with my name and fingerprints everywhere on it. A company that feels alive.

It also wants more, so I give.

In 2022, Tufts University published a study titled, “Only 7% of American Adults Have Good Cardiometabolic Health.” Researchers evaluated blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, adiposity, and cardiovascular disease. Only 6.8 percent of adults met optimal levels across all five markers as of 2017–2018.

I can’t imagine the numbers are better in 2026.

There’s nothing abstract about that to me. It’s directional. For most of us.

The question isn’t whether I want to die. It’s whether I am living in a way that makes decline the default.

There was a time when my body felt like an ally—like my best friend.

One morning, I remember looking down at my Garmin Forerunner 245 and seeing 20 miles logged for the day. I realized, in that moment, that I didn’t actually know where I was. I looked up and oriented myself. I was seven miles from home.

Somehow, while I was lost in my thoughts, my body carried me over twenty miles.

That month, I ran more than 200 miles. That day, I logged 27 miles. There were two 15-mile days tucked into that same stretch of thirty-one days. My lungs were powerful, and my stride was automatic. I didn’t need to negotiate with myself about whether to go. I just went.

I wasn’t reckless either. I was strong; in the best shape of my life at 45 years old. That’s why these thirty-five pounds feel so much heavier than they really are.

It’s stark, frightening contrast.

When you’ve experienced your body at full capacity, mediocrity is betrayal.

Here’s what makes this so uncomfortable to admit. I didn’t wake up wanting to destroy my health. I don’t fantasize about oxygen tanks, amputations, or being too large to fit in a restaurant booth. I love my children. I’ve already seen two of them get married and the three younger ones are growing up just as fast. I want to run with my sons. I want to sit at dinner tables without hissing machines next to me. I want to get down on the floor and play with my grandchildren when they come along.

But my calendar tells a different story.

6 am to 7:30 pm workdays. Saturdays included. The travel season is almost upon me again. There’s stress and diet soda instead of water. Meals inhaled between calls with clients and team members. Runs postponed because there’s “just one more thing” or soul-crushing anxiety.

The company I’m building needs structure, leadership, and clarity. It needs someone willing to retire old versions of himself so it can grow.

But there’s an uncomfortable parallel. You can escape one unhealthy system only to create another. This time, I created one with my name on the door.

The previous company drained me. This one inspires and energizes me.

But both can take everything if I let them.

That’s where the undramatic, crisis-free erosion lives.

The hospital bed isn’t some kind of prediction. It’s a projection of my own momentum.

If I continue to trade sleep for output, movement for meetings, water for caffeine, margin for urgency, what exactly am I expecting the end result to be?

Our bodies are not ideological. My body doesn’t care that I’m building something meaningful. It responds to inputs, consistently and over time.

Calories. Stress. Movement. Rest.

I tell myself I’ll fix it later; after the next product launch; after this round of new hires; after this funding round; after this next season of intensity.

Later is a comforting word.

And a lie.

And trajectories compound.

When I was running 150+ miles a month, I didn’t wake up and decide to run 150 miles or more. I laced up my shoes and ran that day. And then the next. And the one after that. Small (or large) inputs. Repeated.

The current trajectory is built the same way.

Do I want to die?

No, but there’s a more subtle question under that.

Am I living in in a way that suggests I actually want to die the way I described above?

Indifference is one of the best, most patient negotiators.

• You deserve that soda.
• You can skip exercise today.
• The business needs you more than your body does.
• You’ll get serious again next month.

I’ve proven to myself that I can endure 27 miles in a single day. I’ve proven that I can work for 15 weeks straight with little more than 3 hours of sleep per night. I’ve proven I can build a company from scratch. I’ve also proven I can survive environments that leave most people hollow inside.

The question now is simpler and so, so much harder to face.

Will I choose the kinds of inputs that make the hospital scene improbable or likely?

This isn’t a vow to return to 150-mile months. That season may be gone for me. My body’s changed and my responsibilities have multiplied.

But decline doesn’t have to be the accepted default.

I don’t want oxygen tanks, amputations, or to sit across from my children as a diminished version of myself, explaining that the work seemed urgent at the time.

I want breath, strength, and life.

The hospital bed is fiction, but the trajectory isn’t.

And trajectories can be changed.

When Your Inner Critic Learns to Whisper

 

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

I was in a meeting back in March, sitting across the table from a client as we mapped out a pricing strategy they wanted to implement. It wasn’t complicated, just complex. There’s a difference. I love this kind of conversation. It’s one of my favorite things to work on with clients: How do we price things in a way that makes sense for both the business and the customer?

Ideas were firing. I was talking fast, moving from one thought to the next. Pattern-matching in real time, connecting dots as fast as they came. I do this a lot.

It’s how my brain works. When I’m quiet, it’s ideas bouncing around inside my head faster than I can put them on paper. Out loud, it’s chaotic and sometimes noisy.

Frenetic is a word that comes to mind.

Partway through that conversation, abruptly, something inside me shifted.

I was suddenly aware of my own voice. It wasn’t what I was saying, but the way I was saying it. The speed, volume, and drive to keep talking. And then, like an opening just wide enough to slip through, I realized something else: I was trying to prove that I really knew what I was talking about.

That’s when I stopped. Mid-sentence. I apologized for the verbal onslaught. I let the silence sit for a moment and took a deep breath. Then I asked a question instead of offering another answer.

That’s what it looked like on the outside.

But on the inside, it was something different: the whisper of my inner critic, dressed up like helpful urgency.

Most people think of the inner critic as loud, obvious, blunt, and generally cruel. You’re not enough. You’ll never get it right. And sometimes, it is.

But over time, that voice evolves. It gets clever. It finds new disguises. It no longer screams. It suggests. “You should probably say a little more so they don’t think you’re winging it.” “They might assume you haven’t done your homework if you pause too long.”

It offers these thoughts like advice. Like realism. Like good leadership.

But they’re not neutral. They’re fear masquerading as strategy.

When I was younger, my inner critic was easy to spot. It told me I wasn’t good enough. It told me I’d embarrass myself. It made me second-guess every decision before I made it. It was loud, relentless, and predictable.

These days, it’s subtler. It’s learned to speak in my own voice. It uses phrases like “just being cautious” or “managing expectations.” It often tells me to work a little harder or prove I belong at the table. And not because I’m incompetent, but just to be safe. Just to be sure.

And that’s the trouble. The critic has learned to whisper.

That meeting in March didn’t go badly. In fact, it ended up going really well. But that moment of realization stuck with me because I noticed the story under the surface.

It was the story that says: You better say everything you know before they think you don’t know enough.

It sounds like a useful motivator. But really, it’s self-doubt in different Fruit of the Loom.

The hard part is that not everything the inner critic says is wrong. Sometimes it borrows real truths — yes, you should come prepared. Yes, it is helpful to be clear. But it’s the urgency behind the voice that gives it away. The push to prove, not to connect. The need to be enough, rather than to listen.

And if I don’t notice that shift, I end up rushing through the conversation instead of being part of it. I end up presenting instead of partnering.

Silencing the critic isn’t something I’ve mastered. Most days, I still catch myself mid-sentence. Or mid-email. Or mid-apology I didn’t need to make. The voice is still there, still whispering, still convincing me that it’s not doubt — it’s just pragmatism.

But the more I notice it, the more I can choose a different response.

I can stop talking, ask a better question, and trust that I don’t have to fill every silences to prove my value.

Confidence doesn’t mean never hearing the voice. It means knowing what to do when it shows up.

That kind of confidence isn’t loud. It’s quiet and patient; willing to pause and listen. Willing to let the room breathe without rying to own it.

That meeting in March reminded me that I don’t need to say everything I know in one sitting. I don’t have to prove I belong. Sometimes the most valuable thing I bring to the table isn’t my knowledge. It’s my willingness to stop talking when the moment calls for something else.

And that is enough.