Existential Pain – A Path Toward Ourselves

 

Existential Pain – A Path Toward Ourselves

We often speak about pain as something physical. A wound. An illness. Something we can point to.

But pain is not only of the body.

The World Health Organization reminds us that pain is both sensory and emotional—something we experience, not just something that happens to us. And in that small shift, something important opens: pain is not only located in the body. It lives in our experience of being human.

I have come to realize that some of the deepest forms of pain I have known are not physical at all.

They belong to another dimension.

Grief. Loss. Anxiety. The quiet aftermath of trauma.

These are forms of pain that cannot easily be measured, but they can shape a life just as powerfully as any physical injury. Some neuroscientists suggest that the brain itself does not clearly distinguish between these forms—that physical and psychological pain may travel along similar neural pathways. Perhaps this is why relief can sometimes feel similar, regardless of where the pain originates.

But even this distinction—between physical and psychological—does not fully capture what I am trying to understand.

When I sit quietly and turn toward my own pain, something else appears.

In moments of meditation, I have tried to draw it—what I call Mindfulness Art. Not as an explanation, but as a way of seeing.

Pain, for me, becomes color.

Blue and green tones carry my vulnerability.
Yellow and orange hold energy—something still alive, still moving.
And then there is red. The color of rupture. Of crisis. Of moments where I feel a distance from who I truly am.

It is here I recognize something deeper:

Not only physical pain.
Not only psychological pain.
But something I can only call existential pain.

“Not all pain is something to escape. 

Some of it is something to understand.”

A Life Touched by Suffering

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer would not have been surprised by this.

For him, suffering is not an exception—it is the structure of life itself.

We are driven, he says, by a blind will. A force that pushes us to want, to strive, to long. And even when we reach what we desire, something shifts. A new longing appears. Satisfaction slips away.

There is a certain honesty in this perspective.

Perhaps even something unsettling.

Because if Schopenhauer is right, then suffering is not something we simply overcome. It is something we live within.

And yet, there is another voice.

Meaning in the Midst of Pain

The psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, shaped by his experiences in Nazi concentration camps, offers a different way of understanding pain.

He does not deny suffering.

But he asks a different question:

Can suffering carry meaning?

Frankl believed it can.

Even in the most extreme conditions, he observed that some people were able to hold onto a sense of inner freedom—a capacity to choose their attitude, even when everything else was taken from them.

He called this search for meaning logotherapy.

And he introduced a powerful idea: that existential pain often arises not from what happens to us, but from a loss of meaning in how we understand our lives.

He called it the existential vacuum.

And perhaps many of us have touched this space, at least for a moment.

Pain as a Signal

When I try to understand this more deeply, I find myself returning again and again to Søren Kierkegaard.

He writes about despair—not as a failure, but as a condition of the soul.

A signal.

In The Sickness Unto Death, he describes three forms of despair. And I recognize something of myself in each of them:

There are moments when I do not fully know who I am.
Moments when I turn away from myself.
And moments when I try to stand alone—self-sufficient, closed, without relation.

For Kierkegaard, this is not simply psychological difficulty.

It is existential.

And anxiety—what he calls angst—is not merely fear. It is the dizziness of freedom. The realization that we are always standing in the space of possibility, always having to choose.

To live, then, is to carry this weight.

The Pain in Kierkegaards Life

There is something deeply personal in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on pain. One senses that he does not speak about suffering from a distance, but from within it. He grew up under the shadow of a strict and deeply religious father, a man burdened by guilt and a sense of divine judgment, which left its mark on the young Kierkegaard. This early atmosphere of seriousness and melancholy followed him throughout life. 

Perhaps the most painful expression of this inner struggle was his decision to break off his engagement to Regine Olsen—the great love of his life. He believed, in a way that still unsettles us, that he could not become himself within that relationship. So he chose solitude over love, at a great personal cost. 

Added to this were his own physical frailties and a life marked by exhaustion and suffering, culminating in a difficult and painful death. And yet—through all this—Kierkegaard insists that pain is not meaningless. On the contrary, it is precisely through despair, anxiety, and suffering that a human being is called to become oneself. Not by avoiding pain, but by passing through it, and allowing it to speak.

Through Pain, Not Around It

There is a temptation in our time to remove pain as quickly as possible.

To fix it. Silence it. Medicate it.

And sometimes, that is necessary.

But existential pain does not always respond to solutions.

Sometimes it asks something else of us.

To stay.
To listen.
To move through.

Kierkegaard describes how a human being can live in what he calls the aesthetic stage—seeking pleasure, avoiding discomfort, staying on the surface. But sooner or later, life interrupts this. A crisis comes. A rupture.

And with it, the possibility of something deeper.

The ethical.
The religious.
A life lived with greater truth.

But this movement does not happen without cost.

It often passes through existential pain.

A Quiet Realization

I find myself returning to this insight:

Pain is not only something to be avoided.

It is also something that reveals.

Something that calls us back to ourselves.

Not all pain is meaningful. Not all suffering transforms. But sometimes—perhaps more often than we expect—it opens a space where something true can emerge.

And in that space, we are confronted with something essential:

Our freedom.
Our responsibility.
And the fragile possibility of becoming who we are.

Closing Reflection

Perhaps existential pain is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Perhaps it is a sign that something in us is still unfinished.

That life is still asking something of us.

And that, even in the midst of discomfort, we are being invited—

not away from ourselves,
but deeper into who we are becoming.

—Kaare

References

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The sickness unto death (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1849)

Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The world as will and representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover Publications. (Original work published 1818)

World Health Organization. (2020). WHO guidelines on the pharmacological treatment of persisting pain in children. WHO.

International Association for the Study of Pain. (2020). IASP revises its definition of pain. IASP News.

I have often felt that I live on the edge of existence.

Not outside of life—but not entirely within it either.

There is a certain distance there.

A way of seeing that does not always follow what is expected.

And perhaps this is where my experience of being "a little different" becomes part of the picture.

I do not always read the world as others do.

But I see it—sometimes with a clarity, sometimes with an intensity—that feels deeply my own.

It is not always easy.

But it is real.

This text is written by me, but with suggestions from OpenAI/ChatGPT. 

The illustration is created by Open AI/ChatGPT