Is it wrong to say I love sufferings?

On my bedroom wall, there is a handwritten wording of “I love sufferings” on a piece of A4 paper. I wish I could pour my heart out and share with you all that I have suffered, but it would defeat the purpose of this article, and truthfully, it would feel too heavy, too depressing. 

As a queer cancer survivor now living with the disability of not being able to eat through my mouth due to aspiration, and as someone who has walked through losses, grief, bullying, and discrimination with one tragedy I still cannot bring myself to share, I carry enough reasons to say why I love suffering.

In Chinese, there is an old idiom that says the best way to deal with your enemies is to keep them closer. I see harmful thoughts and painful memories in the same way. If I fight them, they fight back. But if I befriend them, I begin to understand them, and in that understanding, their power over me fades.

I love it because it is honest. It never pretends. It is life’s way of reminding us that no one escapes from it. Pain is unavoidable. As the Buddha taught in the First Noble Truth, dukkha is woven into the fabric of existence — birth, aging, illness, death, separation from what we love, encountering what we dislike, not getting what we want. No one is immune from sufferings. 

I love it because it levels the playing field. My pain may look different from yours, but pain is still pain. It doesn’t matter whether it is the sharp sting of betrayal or the deep ache of losing someone we love. To compare only distances us further. In the Sallatha Sutta (The Arrow), the Buddha explained how every person is struck by the first arrow of pain, but the second arrow — the mental one — is the suffering we add when we resist, deny, or judge. That truth humbles me.

And I love suffering because it can be worked with. It can be trained, softened, transformed. As Ajahn Brahm often reminds, when something happens we cannot yet label as good or bad, the wisest stance is, “Who knows?” What looks like tragedy may hold a hidden seed of awakening. What seems unbearable may open the heart to compassion.

Just recently, I was at a Dharma gathering with friends, and the conversation turned toward this very thing — how easy it is to turn suffering into a slogan rather than a practice. I mentioned the term spiritual bypassing, and one of my friends asked, “What’s that?”

I explained that spiritual bypassing is when we use spiritual language to cover over pain instead of facing it. It sounds like wisdom, but it can actually become another form of denial. We’ve all heard those lines: “It’s your karma, just let it go. Don’t dwell on it, think positive.” On the surface, they seem kind, maybe even encouraging. But underneath, they can become traps — ways of silencing what hurts, or pushing away the very experiences we need to understand.

The Buddha never bypassed suffering. He turned toward it. He sat with Mara under the Bodhi tree, unshaken, until Mara left. He invited us not to cling to pain, but also not to deny it. In the Satipatthana Sutta, the instruction is to know clearly, “There is anger in me” or “There is sadness in me.” That’s not bypassing — that’s intimacy with our own humanity. Only from there does transformation become possible.

So is it wrong to be friends with harmful thoughts? I don’t believe so. In fact, I think it’s necessary. If I spend my days running from them, they grow bigger shadows. If I slam the door in their face, they keep knocking louder. But if I sit with them — if I welcome them like guests, even the unwanted ones — then I begin to know them. I see their patterns, their tricks, their disguises. I notice how they rise and pass away, just like everything else.

The harmful thought that tells me I am unworthy — I sit with it. I let it speak. And slowly, I see it is only a habit, not a truth. The harmful thought that whispers life is unfair — I bow to it, and it reveals itself as an old scar, not a prophecy. By meeting them, I weaken their grip. By knowing them, I am less afraid.

To befriend suffering, then, is not to romanticize it or glorify it. It is to look it in the eye and say, I see you, I know you, and you will not define me. As the Buddha said in the Dhammapada, “Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.” Perhaps the same can be said for our inner world: harmful thoughts are not appeased by rejection. Only by understanding do they lose their poison.

So next time a harmful thought comes knocking, maybe don’t rush to exile it. Offer it tea, listen, and learn its ways. The more you know it, the less it can harm you. And one day, you might even discover — as I did with my own suffering — that it has become a strange kind of teacher, one you never wanted but one you cannot imagine your life without.