Nobody told me suffering was optional! | #49
Nobody told me suffering was optional! | #49 Daily Dose of Dawn 🌞
Suffering often feels inevitable—but what if how much you suffer is something you can influence? In Daily Dose of Dawn at dawn #49, Dawn Super shares a powerful realization that changed how she experiences life inside a chronically ill body. Through a simple but meaningful moment of noticing beauty amid mess, this post explores perspective shifts, emotional resilience, and what happens when you stop feeding suffering with your attention. You’ll learn how intentional focus, self-compassion, and curiosity can make your inner world a kinder place to live—even when circumstances don’t change.
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Nobody told me suffering was optional! Daily Dose of Dawn #49
Years ago, as I was knee-deep in rebuilding my life – I asked myself the question – what happens if I don’t think about my suffering?
To be fair, my default was miserable for the first 41 years of my life. I was in a long-term relationship with suffering lol. In every area of life.
When my kids were little, I ran the recycling program for the PTA and once a week me and my youngest would take it to the recycling place and collect the cash for class events.
One day I posted this:
“I dragged over this disgusting, filthy, stinky metal cart with equally gnarly trash bins on it to fill with the glass I had to recycle. I noticed this guy and a buddy as I was dragging it along. The leaf was a foot away. By the time I got the cam set up (this was 2011 lol) he had found the leaf and climbed onto it. Such a cool shot in all the filth... #beautyiseverywhere”
And that little moment - a leaf, a slug, and a filthy cart - became the most unexpected teacher.
And even though my reality was the same... at the same time, I wasn’t.
Have you had that happen? Where your perspective just changed and you started living differently? It’s kinda magical TBH.
Noticing all these randomly beautiful things shining anyway despite the dark… helped me find the beauty of being human while living in a faulty meatsuit. It helped me see that my life could still be beautiful, even though I was tired and in pain all the time.
All these lovely distractions helped me understand that when I fill my head with the notion of hunting down cool things to look at, seeing faces in things, learning new things online… I think about my ‘suffering’ less. That’s gotta be a good thing, right?
I decided to be intentional about it. Run a social experiment on myself and find out – what happens if I don’t think about my suffering? Past, present or future. For a whole month.
This was a great challenge for me because I spent most of my life suffering in one way or another. During that month, when my mind went to highlighting what happened to be miserable at the moment, I would give myself empathy, “Yeah, hey, that sucks…” and move on – “let’s not think about it until next month, mkay?”
The end result was – of course I still had symptoms lol. Nine disabling disorders, there’s always going to be something going on in here – but my MIND became a better place to be while I went through it. I was cheering myself on instead of lamenting.
I still live this way. I’m doing some fascia work in my hips and it often feels like I’ve got broken glass in there. I thank my hips for continuing to guide these legs and I focus on what I’m doing to help them do that. Stretching, trigger point massage, not getting stressed out about stuff, not swirling around in a pit of misery. Which I totes used to do – and if you do too, I get it – no judgment. I will still sometimes have a pity party for one. Then, I blow out my candle and get back to being a badass…
If you’re still here, I know you also find ways to forget the suffering – warrior lifestyle.
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