Emotional pain is among the greatest gifts of humans and one of the abilities which makes them perfect. Only what’s living, real, and loving can suffer. Pain is a dark flower which blossoms from one’s depths and eternal rain which conceals the clearest sunrise.

The moment you wish to protect your heart, you are dead inside. If you set only one barrier because of fear of being hurt, you chain your soul.

In order to avoid being hurt absolutely, you must never love absolutely. And, if you never devote yourself completely, what is the point of existing?

Ayn Rand’s character in the “Fountainhead”, Howard Roark, constantly repeats that one must let pain reach one point but not deeper down. It is not surprising at all that this is being preached by a character who is not capable of love and by an author who aims to destroy love. Howard claimed he suffered for the right things but he did not have the emotional capacity to care enough. And he did not want to have it. Howard is too shallow to let pain reach the bottom.

When people go through an unhappy love, they decide not to love again so that they don’t feel pain. And to never trust again. Once again, we witness an impressive demonstration of how to be a worm.

Such conclusions show two things. First, the emotion in question was not love at all. The one who suffers probably did not even bother to look at their beloved. Otherwise, in most cases, they would have seen that the other person is no good for anything but for betraying him. And even the cruelest betrayal is too low a price for true love. Second, the betrayed one is weak and cowardly because only a weakling would refuse to love just because they got burnt once. It is like never eating ice cream again only because one time you got a sore throat. Or to never ride a bike again after falling the first time.

When someone disappoints me, my only concern is whether I will find someone who can hurt me more. Because every suffering makes you stronger, harsher, and more invulnerable. Your heart creates a natural barrier called maturity. But you know that the next person who hurts you would have been able to reach you in spite of this.

There is no love without pain. It is there since the very appearance of love. Pain from the fact that the other person exists, from the fact that you exist, from the fact that the two of you exist in the same reality and from the fact that there will be realities in which you will be one without the other, from the fact that you will be together only in the conditions of this world and that you will be together in all the eternities of Everything. When you love, you split yourself in two and at the same time you create a more complete self than what you can bear. Of course, this hurts.

The ability to lose is what guarantees a meaning in our lives. And if we are going to lose, is it not better to lose something we really care about? When the knife is about to strike your shoulder, you must turn your heart towards the blade.

Pain is a key towards the human soul and the road to freedom. The one who has suffered and has continued to fight cannot be stopped. They can break my heart. They can put me on my knees. But they cannot stop me from loving. I hurt. I am all-powerful.