"I was taught that pain is bad"
About this Quote
A small sentence with a whole upbringing stuffed inside it, Keith Miller's line is less a confession than a diagnosis. "I was taught" points the finger away from biology and toward culture: pain isn't just something the body registers, it's something the community interprets for you. That passive construction matters. He isn't claiming pain is bad; he's reporting the lesson, the script, the hand-me-down belief system.
The phrase also quietly reveals what it costs. If pain is automatically "bad", then it becomes evidence of failure: you did something wrong, you weren't careful enough, you weren't strong enough, you didn't pray hard enough, you didn't optimize your life correctly. That framing doesn't eliminate pain; it adds shame, fear, and urgency to "fix" it. In a modern self-help culture that treats discomfort as a glitch, the subtext lands like a rebuttal: sometimes pain is information, sometimes it's grief, sometimes it's growth, sometimes it's the price of honesty.
Contextually, the quote reads like the opening of a longer unlearning. It's the first domino in a narrative about revising inherited wisdom - from family, faith, masculinity, or any environment where endurance is praised but suffering is stigmatized. The starkness of "bad" is childlike, almost moral. Miller lets that simplicity hang there so the reader can feel the naivete of it, and maybe recognize their own. The intent isn't to romanticize pain; it's to expose how quickly we moralize it, and how that moralizing can become its own kind of injury.
The phrase also quietly reveals what it costs. If pain is automatically "bad", then it becomes evidence of failure: you did something wrong, you weren't careful enough, you weren't strong enough, you didn't pray hard enough, you didn't optimize your life correctly. That framing doesn't eliminate pain; it adds shame, fear, and urgency to "fix" it. In a modern self-help culture that treats discomfort as a glitch, the subtext lands like a rebuttal: sometimes pain is information, sometimes it's grief, sometimes it's growth, sometimes it's the price of honesty.
Contextually, the quote reads like the opening of a longer unlearning. It's the first domino in a narrative about revising inherited wisdom - from family, faith, masculinity, or any environment where endurance is praised but suffering is stigmatized. The starkness of "bad" is childlike, almost moral. Miller lets that simplicity hang there so the reader can feel the naivete of it, and maybe recognize their own. The intent isn't to romanticize pain; it's to expose how quickly we moralize it, and how that moralizing can become its own kind of injury.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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