Some things cannot be taught to us. We cannot be taught how to feel. No one ever sat me down and said, “Okay this is how you are supposed to feel when someone betrays you,” or, “This is how you make someone feel pain.” Unfortunately, Feeling pain is not something we can be taught: it is something that we just feel.

Surprisingly, I remember the first time I physically got hurt. I was at the park with my family: brother playing on his DS, mom sitting under the tree with her book, and dad fishing down by the lake. I wanted to go down to the lake to see if my dad caught anything, so with my Little Mermaid flip-flops, I started to run down to my dad. Next thing I know, I am on the ground holding my knee while blood is spilling out from my fingertips and making a small pool around my foot. I fell down and scraped all of the skin off of my knee and was crying. It hurt so badly and I felt the pain like I never had before. It was the first time that I really felt pain and no one told me that when I was hurt I would feel that physical pain: I just did.

The first time I truly hurt someone, we both felt the pain. I do not know if it was his reaction that made me feel pain or the fact that I would ever say that to someone I cared about. I became so unbelievably angry that I told my best friend that I hated him; I said it right to his face. He sort of just looked at me like a deer in the headlights, almost as if he did not believe that I felt that way. The sight of seeing the strongest person you knew with tears in their eyes is probably one of the worst pains there is because you both hurt. Of course I did not actually mean to say that, but he thought that I did. And those were the last words I ever got to say to him. He left thinking that I hated him. I had hurt him in a way that I never thought that I was capable of doing. For that, knowing that I hurt him and knowing that the last thing I ever got to say to him was, “I hate you” made me feel a great amount of pain that no one had ever prepared me for.

Something often associated with pain is heart break. And no heart break hurts worse than your first one. When you grow to care about someone so much and they just stop caring about you the same way, it is a pain that sticks with you for a very long time. A heart break hurts so much it seems irrecoverable to undo the emotional amount of pain you and your heart had to endure. Of course you will eventually get over it, but pain is watching the person you still care so deeply for hold hands and smile with another girl. Pain is watching them look at someone else the way they used to look at you. Pain is looking that person in the eye and knowing that they do not look at you the same way they used to. Everyone always tells you that eventually you are going to get your heart broken, but no one ever told us or taught us how much we would actually hurt. It is a pain that everyone goes through, but no one equipped you with the element to feel such a significant amount of pain, or even how to deal with it. It is one of the pains that only time alone can make fade away.

Feeling pain is hurtful, it is depressing, and it is also angering. Some pains are ephemeral. Others stay with you like an emotional scar. No one taught us how to feel pain, but feeling pain is elemental. Without pain, we would never be able to learn that we should not run in Little Mermaid flip-flops, or say things we do not mean, or even let someone break your heart. Feeling pain is a feeling that no one ever wants to feel, but feeling pain is not something we can control: we just feel it.