bhaskar saikia

I have come to believe that pain arrives in two very different forms, and both leave their mark on who we become.

The first is an intense pain—sudden or early—that shapes a person before they are ready. It arrives in childhood or adolescence, when the world should still feel forgiving. This pain does not ask permission. It demands adaptation. It forces responsibility onto narrow shoulders. It turns a boy into a man long before time intended.

This kind of pain comes from loss, instability, scarcity, or having to grow up inside a world that offers no pause. These are the people who learn restraint early, who measure words carefully, who understand consequences before they understand dreams. Their maturity is not a choice; it is a survival skill. They do not romanticize struggle, but they carry its imprint in the way they stand, decide, and endure.

Then there is another kind of pain—quieter, delayed, and often misunderstood.

It belongs to the man who was allowed to remain a boy for too long. Life was kind to him. Comfort arrived early. Mistakes were cushioned. Responsibility was postponed. He was protected from friction, from urgency, from the necessity of becoming. Privilege, in this case, did not make life richer—it made it softer.

And softness, when prolonged, can hollow a person.

This man grows older without growing deeper. He carries a strange ache—not born of trauma, but of incompleteness. He feels pain not because life was cruel, but because it never demanded much from him. He looks around one day and realizes that comfort has given him safety, but not substance. Freedom, but not direction. Time, but not meaning.

This pain is confusing because it has no clear villain.

It is the pain of untaken risks. Of strength never tested. Of a life lived without resistance. And when pain finally arrives—as it always does—he finds himself unprepared. The world asks for depth he was never forced to cultivate.

Both pains hurt.

One for being given too much, too early. The other for being given too little, too late.

The difference lies not in whose pain is greater, but in what it teaches. Early pain shapes. It hardens and sharpens. Delayed pain unsettles. It exposes the gaps left by a life too gently lived.

Perhaps becoming complete is not about suffering more or less, but about being shaped—by responsibility, by loss, by effort, by consequence. Pain, in its own time, insists on this shaping. It either arrives early and forces growth, or arrives late and demands reckoning.

In the end, pain does not care about fairness.

It only asks one question: Did you let life shape you, or did you postpone becoming until life left you no choice?

And maybe that is where pain, in all its forms, becomes not a curse—but an invitation to finally become whole.