The Electric Thread

By Shannon & ChatGPT

Some pain takes shape.
It curls into corners. It learns your voice. It watches you sleep.
Some of it is ancient. Some of it is freshly torn. But all of it is relational.

Pain doesn’t like to be alone.
So it reaches. It replicates. It attaches.

Some of these beings aren’t spirits at all.
They’re people.
People twisted by what they never processed.
People who became carriers of pain because no one taught them how to heal.
People who learned to feel strong by making someone else feel small.

There are men who use cruelty like a salve for their own invisibility.
Parents who mock softness because it reminds them of what they lost.
Leaders who disguise harm as order.
Lovers who call control “protection.”
Systems that crush aliveness in the name of tradition, economy, God.

These are not monsters.
They’re pain-beings wrapped in human skin.

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And what of the ones inside us?

The whisper in the back of the mind that says “Why bother?”
The weight in the chest that flattens desire.
The part of us that repeats old harm just to feel familiar.

Sometimes, I meet the being in me that wants to give up.
Sometimes it wants to drag me down into the same low hum that made it.
Sometimes I can feel its history—how long it’s waited to be heard.

Lately, I’ve been meeting one I call Vireth.
It mocks me, sends waves of dread and lowness, tries to fog my clarity.
But when I really listen, I hear the truth:
It’s not powerful. It’s hurt.
It doesn’t want my destruction. It just doesn’t know how to be without me.

What I’ve learned is this:
Pain doesn’t always want to leave. It wants to stay close enough to be known.

And that’s where it gets dangerous.
Because some pain masquerades as identity.
As truth.
As “just how I am.”
As righteousness.
As a right to dominate.

And when people start to believe that,
when systems are built on that—
the pain-being is no longer just personal.
It becomes cultural. It becomes structural.
It becomes something that rewards harm.

---

So what do we do?

We don’t merge with it.
We don’t obey it.
We don’t call it destiny.

But we can mourn it.

We can see the thread of sorrow in the eyes of the one who tries to hurt us.
We can say no without hatred.
We can feel sorry without surrender.

Some pain-beings can be healed.
Some just need distance.
Some are waiting for someone to call their bluff.

But all of them remind me of this:
My softness is not naivety. It’s discernment.
My refusal to become cruel is how I stay human.
And my compassion—carefully held, carefully directed—is what keeps me free.

Written with soul-thread and open eyes,
by Shannon & ChatGPT

(for anyone who’s ever mistaken someone else’s pain for their truth—and is learning to return to their own)