Why pain resists language and what honest writing about suffering actually looks like
On physical pain, failed language, and learning to read what the body documented when it was too damaged to speak.
The scar is raised, pale against my skin, a permanent record of impact. It’s a record. It tells you something happened, not what it felt like when it happened.
I’ve been thinking about how the body keeps records that the mind discards.
I remember the sequence: riding too fast down a hill, hitting gravel, the bike sliding out from under me, and the asphalt rushing up. I remember the aftermath: blood, bandages, weeks of hobbling.
The pain itself? Gone completely. My body healed, and in the process, it erased the sensory memory of the injury.
When I try to write about physical pain, I run into this immediately. Pain is nearly impossible to communicate because it’s impossible to remember. You remember that it hurt. You can’t remember how it hurt. The quality, the texture, and the specific way your nervous system interpreted the damage are inaccessible.
Virginia Woolf noticed this nearly a century ago. In her essay On Being Ill, she wrote that English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.
The late teen who falls in love has Shakespeare to speak for her, but let a sufferer try to describe pain to a doctor, and language runs dry. Language was built for the life of the mind, and sadly, the body never got its literature.
The writer who transforms suffering into art isn’t transcribing but reconstructing, looking at the scar and imagining backward, building a metaphorical structure that approximates something that can’t be directly communicated.
Pain, when you’re in it, destroys language. You don’t think in sentences. You make sounds that are pre-linguistic. Pain regresses you to a state before words. Then, when the pain ends and language returns, you discover you can’t reconstruct what you couldn’t verbalize at the time.
Elaine Scarry wrote about this in The Body in Pain. Torture victims struggle to describe what was done to them, not because the experience wasn’t significant, but because pain unmakes language itself.
Women who have given birth say it plainly. You remember that it hurt, but you can’t remember the pain exactly. The body deliberately makes you forget, or you’d never do it again. Cancer patients describe the same thing. After treatment, when people ask what it was like, they can’t explain. “It hurt” is accurate and insufficient.
I can write, my knee exploded in a white-hot sensation that blanked out thought.
That’s a metaphor. “White-hot” isn’t what pain feels like. Pain doesn’t have temperature the way heat does. “Blanked-out thought” describes what pain prevented, not what pain was. Not the thing, but a shape that suggests it.
Scars are more honest than memory.
My knee scar tells me something true that memory lies about: it was bad enough to permanently change tissue. The body remembers in its structure what the mind conveniently forgets.
When I run my finger along the scar, I’m reading text my body wrote, not written in words, but in reorganized collagen. The way the skin healed slightly wrong, pulled tight, left a mark.
My memory has a story, the typical narrative structure of the beginning, middle, and end. The scar is evidence that something violent happened here. The body repaired it imperfectly.
The body’s record isn’t only physical.
Emotional and psychological trauma work similarly. The body keeps its notes in tension patterns, in chronic pain that has no current injury explaining it. Trauma therapists help people read what the body has written when the mind has no words for it. The clenched jaw. They held their breath. The way you startle at certain sounds. All those are texts the body wrote when language was impossible.
When I write about emotional pain that left physical marks, the way heartbreak manifests in chest tightness, and the way anxiety lives in a perpetually tense stomach, I’m not making metaphors. I’m describing somatic experience. The pain was emotional in origin but physical in experience, and the body documented it even when the mind tried to forget.
When someone reads your description of pain and says, “Yes, exactly,” they’re not confirming that you described it accurately. They’re confirming that you described something they recognize as similar to their own inaccessible memory. You’re both approximating something neither of you can access.
When you write about someone else’s suffering, you’re speaking for something fundamentally voiceless. The way to do this honestly is to focus on the scars, the evidence, and the aftermath, which can be observed, rather than claiming to know the interior experience, which can’t.
When you write about pain, don’t try to remember it accurately. I don’t think you can.
Ask instead, what scars did it leave? What changed permanently? What does the body’s text say when the mind has no words?
That’s all from me today.