when in pain, zoom out!
The thing about pain is that it's tyrannical. It crops your life, redrawing its borders around a single, catastrophic moment: a rejection email, a breakup, a humiliating mistake you harrowingly replay in your head. It crops your vision, and your feral instinct becomes staring even harder at the dumpster fire, in hopes your vigilance would reverse it.
When I feel my world collapsing, I learned to zoom out. Analogically, it's like a framing back a camera, widening the lens until the edges of the periphery return. When I'm living inside of pain, I always mistake proximity for permanence, but my scale recalibrates when I widen the lens of my life. I become a person in an apartment, in a city, in a country, on a planet spinning 1,040 mph in an offensively vast, indifferent universe.
The humiliation is still there, of course. It just isn't everything.
This isn't an insulting attempt to belittle your suffering (Nothing I hate more than saying "But other people have it worse"!) but an act of perspective. I widen the frame to soothe my panic, steady my pulse. When I zoom out to the year instead of the week, to my life instead of this chapter, I remember how much of my life has already unraveled and reassembled and how many more will.
My life isn't small, but simultaneously? There is mercy in realizing, in the grand scheme of things, it still is. Because small means survivable, doable. It means my current grief doesn't define my remaining existence.
A while ago, a kind reader emailed me a link to this video, as response to the final part of what do you when life keeps going on without you. Thank you!