We all have different ways of processing pain. Why do you think some people move on quickly after a breakup, while for others, it takes months and even years? Some people heal fast, while others keep the pain trapped in their hearts. When people like this get hurt, they hold on to the pain and eventually, they transfer it to others without meaning to. This is what we call the circle of pain. The circle of pain is very easy to understand. Simply put, it is when a victim becomes the offender. If someone gets hurt and in the nearest future, the same person hurts someone else as a result of being inflicted upon them. I have experienced this many times. As a matter of fact, I have been on both the giving and receiving end.
During my first year in the university, my hostel mates and I would go from one hostel to another, looking for places to charge. At the time, we did not have a hostel generator and there was no electricity at all in the hostel. We needed to charge our devices. To survive, we would look for hostels around and ask politely if we could charge our devices. Sometimes, we would charge our phones and stay with them till they got fully charged, and other times, we would plug our power banks and leave them to charge. One fateful day, as usual, we went to the hostel close to ours to charge. No one said anything about us being allowed to charge, but that day, the hostel guys came out angrily and chased us out of the hostel. It was as if they had a meeting to bundle us out.
They didn't give us any reason. They chased us out like we had stolen something. It was the first time someone would treat me that way. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. I didn’t feel too much hurt because it was me and my hostelmates. We were pained. Sluggishly, we dragged our feet and left the hostel. That day, we were the victims, but who knew 3 months later, the victim would become the offenders?
3 months later, we got our own hostel gen. We stopped going to places to charge because we now had our own generator so what we did was to contribute and buy fuel. Interestingly, on a fateful day, people from the hostel who chased us that day came to our place to charge. Apparently, their generator was faulty that day. But they were not the people who chased us, they were from that same hostel. We got furious when we realized they were from the hospital that chased us like animals. We didn’t even want to know that they weren’t the same people, we also got out angrily and chased them out of our hostel, just like they did a few months ago.
CAN THEY BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR IT?
If someone gets hurt and then in the nearest future, the same person hurts someone else as a direct result of the initial pain inflicted upon them, can they be held accountable for it? Using my friends as a case study, can we be responsible for the pain we inflicted on innocent people?
It is not easy to overcome pain, especially when it hits deeply, but the truth is that we are responsible for our decisions. We are responsible for the pain we inflict on others, regardless of the fact that it was a result of the pain caused by another person. The fact that those guys chased us out of their hostel doesn’t justify our doing the same to innocent people simply because they were from the same hostel. There is a way to stop the cycle of pain, and it starts with you. It starts when you learn how to let go. I understand that it isn’t easy, but that’s the only way.
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Thanks for reading.