Honestly, when deciding which I topic I was going to write about, I didn’t think I would pick suffering. For me (and for most people, I think) suffering is painful to read about and even more so to write about. But then I thought, isn’t that sort of the point?

I’m not going to focus on my own suffering though, but rather, the suffering I’ve witnessed in others.

Suffering is different than regular pain, I think. Suffering is enduring a pain that cannot be overcome, a type of pain that cannot be helped. The first time I witnessed true suffering, I was six years old. I knelt in the tall grass of our orchard, in the shade of the apple trees, my cheeks smudged with tears and blood, a dying tweety-bird clasped in my small hands. The birds were cherry-eaters, a threat to our livelihood; our whole lives my brothers and I had been taught to shoot any ones that we saw. And I had. I’d shot it. But I hadn’t done as instructed, hadn’t made a kill-shot. My BB hit slightly above the bird’s heart, leaving it to slowly and painfully bleed to death. This beautiful, fragile creature was suffering because of me, and I couldn’t bring myself to shoot again, to put the poor animal out of its misery. I don’t know how long I knelt there in the grass but it seemed so, so long before its poor, injured heart finally ceased to beat.

Flash forward ten years and I’m a young teenager, toughened by time. Time will do that to a person, ya know? For a rare few, time will slowly peel back their layers, exposing more and more of who they truly are. But for most of us? Time builds up on our backs, toughing our hides and creating a shell to protect us from the suffering of this world. So, I was sixteen, and time had made me tough. On this particular day, I was on Facebook, killing time and brain cells, when a private instant message from a friend appeared on my dash. It was a friend I had known a few years and was very close too. He had four brothers just like me. He wrote fantasy stories in his spare time and I critiqued them for him. Sometimes we went to Wendy’s for ice cream on Wednesdays. In his message, he told me he was considering suicide.

That’s the sort of thing that stops your heart. The sort of thing that makes your hands turn cold and your stomach reject everything it’s holding. That’s the sort of thing that can pierce right through a tough teenager’s shell. Because this is someone you love, someone you can’t imagine life without. And they’re suffering.

And don’t tell me I’m jumping to conclusions because if somebody wants to end their life it’s because they’re suffering. It’s because they’re experiencing a type of pain that they believe can’t be helped.

Suddenly, I was that six-year-old child again, clutching a songbird in the palms of my hands, sobbing at the sight of all the blood, and knowing there was nothing I could do.

Maybe this essay is about my own suffering after all. Maybe helplessness… is its own kind of suffering.