Pain Became My Proof of Sincerity

This is a piece about how extractive frameworks teach us to confuse sacrifice with virtue. And how suffering becomes the credential we’re trained to offer in exchange for legitimacy. It’s a reflection on work, commitment, and the stories we inherit about what dedication looks like, especially in spaces shaped by care, justice, and “necessary” labor.

Today, and every day, I hope we can interrogate these narratives—and the limits they place on our collective liberation, and what we believe is possible.

For a long time, I believed that if my work did not hurt, it did not count.

Not metaphorically. Not in a vague, “growth is uncomfortable” way. I mean materially: low pay, long hours, emotional exposure, instability, exhaustion. The work had to cost me something fundamental, or it felt morally incomplete. If it wasn’t the hardest work, for the most vulnerable people, under the most strained conditions, then I questioned whether it was enough.

I organized nearly two decades of my life around this belief.

The jobs I took paid very little. Many offered no real security. But they were necessary work. Work I believed communities depended on to survive. Work that sat close to harm, crisis, and precarity. I told myself that I was committed. That I cared. That I was willing to do what others would not.

What I did not question was the rule underneath it all: that commitment is proven through sacrifice, that sincerity is measured in pain, and that choosing something because you enjoy it is, at best, indulgent and at worst, irresponsible. This belief is not rare. It is cultural infrastructure. And it does not appear by accident.

The belief that moral value requires personal harm is built and reinforced by extractive systems that require people to confuse sacrifice with virtue. Capitalism depends on underpaid labor being reframed as “calling.” White supremacy depends on justice and care work being treated as morally virtuous but structurally disposable. Patriarchy depends on endurance, self-erasure, and over-functioning being recoded as strength.

These systems do not need to convince everyone. They only need enough people to internalize the logic that says: if the work matters, you should be willing to suffer for it.

Once that belief is installed, enforcement becomes unnecessary. We choose the depletion ourselves. We call it commitment. We call it responsibility. We call it love.

We derive emotional satisfaction from overwork and “mission-driven” labor. We shake our heads, encourage one another to rest, but then praise burnout as dedication. We treat endurance as proof of value rather than a warning signal. We teach people who are drawn to care and community work that if the work doesn’t deplete you, you must not be taking it seriously.

I believed that wanting sustainability, pleasure, or fit meant I was failing to grasp the urgency of the moment. That there were people suffering, and choosing anything less than maximum hardship was a kind of betrayal.

The problem with this logic is not that the work isn’t real. Or that it doesn’t sometimes require us to stretch beyond comfort. It’s that the equation is incomplete. There is work that is hard because it matters. And then there is the belief that work must hurt in order to matter. Those are not the same thing.

When pain becomes the measure of sincerity, it erases other forms of legitimacy. It rejects the ethics of balance and sustainability: work that is steady instead of frantic; work that is well-resourced instead of threadbare; work done with care for the person doing it, not just the people served. Work that endures so that the workers may rest when they need to.

I can honor the work I did without revering the systems that demanded my exhaustion. My commitment to my communities, and to justice, is real without my personal struggle serving as the receipt. I am no longer willing to confuse that cost with value. Individual suffering does not inherently create better outcomes for others. If we want to be genuinely useful, we have to stop mistaking depletion for virtue and start building what sustains our communities, including ourselves.