He said something like “focus on the pain, let it turn into water and wash over and away from you,” which, in retrospect, isn’t actually that bad of an outlook once you understand it, because noticing, understanding, and accepting pain is a pretty good way of dealing with minor injuries (like I splashed my hand with boiling oil 6 months ago and can still see the scar from that, but at the time I just kept cooking and ran it under cold water when I could step away for a second, and my response was to laugh about it and use it as a lesson to be more careful in the future), but goddamn is it the dumbest and least useful shit to tell a kid with a skinned knee.
Anyways I thought of this because of that other post about hot peppers, because eating lots of hot peppers is what actually taught me how to accept and process pain, since once you’ve got that capsaicin soaking into your soft mouth tissue literally the only thing you can do is accept it and relax until the pain fades out.
Eating a ghost pepper and going through the stages of pain it brought upon 14 yr me also taught me how to mentally muscle through pain
I remember eating a small piece of a jalapeno when I was around that age, and the pain just wouldn’t stop and I couldn’t deal with it.
Then in my 20s I was growing habeneros and ghost peppers and I’d just, like, pick a ghost pepper off the plant and eat it and it would be a bit warm, maybe sting a little, for 5 minutes.
I should grow hot peppers again, maybe try to get some brazilian starfish peppers because those were mild (about on par with habeneros) but they had such a nice flavor to them they stand out as one of my favorite peppers.
My dad’s college roommate and close friend earl would put ghost pepper in his tacos. He’s the type of dude that would drink a hot sauce called “colon annihilator” or some shit. Anyway he’s the one who gave me that ghost pepper, he told me not to touch my eyes but I forgor 💀. I miss him