The Commodification of Suffering
A monologue on turning pain into product.
Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
But what happens when the story is no longer untold? What happens when your pain becomes your profile, when your trauma becomes your tagline, when healing becomes a hashtag, but not a practice?
You see, we are living in a time where suffering is not just seen. It's monetized, marketed, packaged for clicks, and shared for clout.
The raw becomes merely a reel. The process becomes performance. The wound becomes the brand.
Guy Debord said, “The spectacle is not a collection of images. It is a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
We have confused visibility with healing, as if exposure alone equals transformation. But catharsis is not cure. Disclosure is not depth. Not every testimony is sacred. Some are just bait for a broken algorithm.
You’ve seen it. The trauma dump dressed in pastel filters. The influencer whose niche is being broken beautifully. The caption that says, “Healing is not linear,” but the life still revolves around the wound.
Let’s be clear: telling your story can be holy. But telling it too soon, to the wrong audience, can become just another way to stay stuck, not healed, just heard, not transformed, just consumed.
“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll eventually bleed all over those people who didn’t cut you.”
Except now, we’re rewarded for bleeding publicly. We’ve created economies around our exorcisms. Publishers want raw. Producers want tragic. Platforms want you broken, but photogenic about it.
And in spiritual spaces, even there, pain sells. Suffering becomes a résumé. The more you’ve endured, the more you’re listened to, even if you’ve never truly integrated any of it.
We applaud survival, but rarely ask if survival ever turned into peace.
Suffering is not competition. Pain does not make you pure. And here’s the danger: when we only validate people through their pain, they begin to see their pain as their only value. Healing starts to feel like erasure... like invisibility... like irrelevance.
We must remember this:
You are more than what hurt you. You are more than the worst thing that has ever happened to you. You don’t have to prove your worth through your wounds.
Healing doesn’t need an audience. It needs honesty. It needs discipline. Stillness. It needs to know the limits of what’s healthy for it.
You don’t need to be public to be powerful. You don’t need to bleed out loud to be real.
Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
But once the light enters, it’s okay to close the door for a while, to let it glow quietly, to let it nourish you without needing to explain it to the public or to the world.
Because real healing isn’t always visible. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like walking away, from platforms, from people, from personas you built to survive.
Let this be the rebellion: to reclaim your suffering from the systems that seek to profit from it, to give your pain a purpose, not a pitch, to be whole, even if no one claps, to find healing, even when no one is watching.
Your story is your own. But your peace is your responsibility.
Let peace, not performance, be your next chapter.
