Some aches stay buried under the armor. Others rise to the surface when we least expect them: midway through a story, a song, or even a line from a stage play.
A few days ago brought a reprieve from the usual Utah August heat. Cooler than normal, though still plenty warm. By the time Footloose wrapped up at Hale Centre Theatre, it was past 10:00 p.m., and the air conditioner was still running in the car the whole way home. My wife and I didn’t say much which is usually a sign that the performance had stirred something deeper in both of us, beyond the choreography and the music.
The phrase how tightly do we hold our pain landed in my chest after a quiet scene between Ren McCormack and Reverend Shaw Moore. Two men, both young in different ways, carrying different kinds of loss. The Reverend’s son, Bobby, had died in a car accident five years earlier. Ren’s father had walked out on him and his mother. Different griefs, same impact: both lives rearranged in a way that couldn’t be undone.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even as the show built toward its joyful finale — the moment when the teens of Bomont and their parents finally come together to dance — I kept circling back to the grip.
The hold we keep on what’s hurt us.
We say there’s no wrong way to grieve, and I believe that. But I also know there’s a point when pain stops being something we feel and starts being something we grip. We wrap our fingers around it, squeeze it like it’s the last thing tethering us to what we lost. And we tell ourselves that if we loosen our grip, we’re letting go of them.
It’s not a perfect comparison, but pain can be like holding a tennis ball. If you hold it lightly, you can carry it in your palm for hours. But squeeze it with all your strength, and your hand starts to ache within minutes. The weight hasn’t changed, only the way you’re holding it.
I thought of people I’ve known who’ve carried pain like that. And, if I’m honest, I thought about myself.
Years ago, I knew a woman who had a stroke. She got to the hospital quickly, and her neurologist believed she could make a full recovery if she committed to therapy. But therapy hurt. Learning to move her arm again was exhausting. Relearning how to walk was slow. Speech therapy made her feel embarrassed and frustrated.
So she stopped trying.
Without movement, her body began to seize up. The leg that might have carried her never fully worked again. The arm that might have reached for a glass of water stayed limp at her side. Her speech never returned to what it had been. She required full-time care for the rest of her life.
I can’t know what her future might’ve been if she’d kept trying. None of us can. But I know her chances at recovery were better than what she ended up with. She didn’t just feel her pain. She let it stop her from moving.
The irony is that recovery often hurts more than the injury itself. Physical therapy can be more painful than the accident. Emotional healing is no different. If we don’t move through the pain — if we never stretch the part of ourselves that broke — we can lose the ability to use it again.
On that drive home, I realized I’ve done my own version of this.
No, I haven’t been through anything like a stroke. But I’ve held on to smaller hurts: betrayals, disappointments, and moments where I felt overlooked, and gripped them like they were proof of something important. Like letting go would somehow invalidate that they mattered.
And if I’m really honest, I’ve done this not only with pain, but with patterns. I’ve clung to habits I know aren’t good for me out of comfort, out of familiarity, or just sheer stubbornness. Giving up soda, for example, should be easy compared to learning to walk again, but some days, it feels like letting go of something essential. It’s not the habit itself that’s hard. It’s how tightly I’ve wrapped my fingers around it.
The strange thing about holding pain tightly is that it can feel almost noble. Like we’re honoring the depth of the loss by refusing to let it go. We convince ourselves that if we set it down, or even hold it more loosely, we’re betraying the memory of what happened.
But maybe the deeper betrayal is when we let our lives shrink around the pain.
Like Reverend Moore, we sometimes mistake clinging for honoring. His grief turned into rules, into rigidity, into distance from the people he was called to care for. But when he loosened his grip — when he allowed the town to dance again — he wasn’t letting go of Bobby. He was making space for life to keep going.
Letting go almost never means forgetting. I don’t think loosening our grip means the loss stops mattering either.
I think it just means we’re making room for our life to grow again.
When I think about the tennis ball, I realize that what wears us out is not the pain itself. It’s the pressure we keep on it. Just like holding something lightly makes it sustainable, holding pain gently allows it to remain part of our story without becoming the whole of it.
That night, we drove the rest of the way home with the A/C humming. The August air outside had cooled, but I didn’t turn it off. My wife sat quietly beside me, both of us still in our own thoughts about the show.
And I kept thinking about the grip. How much energy it takes to squeeze something endlessly. How much more space there is in your hand when you don’t.
I’m still learning this. Still loosening my fingers.
And that is enough.
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