The Feminine Urge to Feel Growing Pains

Do you remember being kept awake at night by that gnawing pain in your legs as a child?

I remember being ready and set - knee-length nightie on, teddy in the nook of my elbow - already envisioning the quest I would be going on in that night’s dream, when I was rudely interrupted by a sensation I could not help but pay attention to.  

I would shuffle around in bed, go to wake up my parents, or even sleep on the floor of my brother’s room - countless attempts to try and shake off this feeling that was seriously impeding on my carefully thought-out sleeping plans for that night.  

Despite my obvious frustration, these gnawing pains did not seem to understand the premise that they were extremely unwelcome under the princess canopy of my bed.

Now, given that I stand at 180cm tall, you can see that these growing pains did in fact come back night after night after night. Eventually, I was able to make my peace with these nocturnal interruptions. I would feel them and still let myself go on into sleep.

That was my first lesson in growth: it can hurt and still be essential.

You should treat your broken ankles

We learn to see pain as a problem. Something to fix, avoid, or silence. But what if pain is a threshold? A message? A path?

A broken ankle will swell and take on a flamboyant combination of colourings. If left untreated – if you keep walking without taking notice of it – it can lead to chronic pain, arthritis, and even nerve damage.

Emotional pain is no different. If we don’t acknowledge it, feel it, move through it, it lodges somewhere inside. It can leave us dissociated, numb, reactive, angry, unsettled, or misaligned. If we don’t cross the bridge of pain, the bridge only gets longer. Eventually, we can feel stuck on one end, waving across to a version of ourselves we long for but can’t quite reach.

Isn’t arthritis from that untreated broken ankle the perfect metaphor? When we avoid pain, we lose flexibility. Suddenly we become less adaptable. We struggle to move through life with the same ease as before. It’s a kind of hardening. A symptom of our resistance to the very treatment and care that could make us feel much better.

Kahlil Gibran wrote ‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.’ The shell must crack for us to grow.

We are nervous of our vulnerability to pain. The dictionary defines vulnerability as ‘the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.’ But I would extend that: it is also the possibility of being surprised. Of being grown. Of being changed. Of feeling and living life to its fullest capacity.

If we live life with our shields up, we can only peek over the top of them. We miss the full view.

Frankenstein’s monster? We are not made in pieces.

We love to compartmentalise. To separate the mind from the body, the spiritual from the physical, the emotional from the intellectual growth. I understand why - it keeps our humanity neatly categorised. But aren’t these all interconnected parts of us? Are they not all one?

Is it not our whirring minds that keep our tired bodies awake when we are trying to find sleep?

 Is it not an emotional reaction we would have as children when we fell and scraped our knees? 

Are these not signals from the same system?

We seem to find physical pain easier to digest and accept, we see it as inevitable.

 But emotional pain? That is often treated like a fault line, not a function.

When we begin to see all pain as part of what it means to be alive, we can start to invite it in. The same way we do joy, clarity, or pleasure. We can give ourselves permission to accept pain as we accept the seasons, the sun and the rain. It is part of an alive world.

The science of transformation

This brings me to a particular theory of systems developed by Nobel-Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. He asked: what happens when systems are pushed far from equilibrium?

His work applies to thermodynamic systems, like cells for example. When a cell’s system is disrupted – by heat, pressure, energy – it becomes unstable. If pushed far enough, the cell reaches something called a bifurcation point: a threshold of stability, the point where the cell is left with two options, collapse or reorganise into a new, often more complex structure.

This is a moment of crisis for the cell – but also of creativity. It is a point of novelty, evolution, and transformation.  

 We, too, are living systems. We meet our own bifurcation points.

Moments when the version of ourselves we’ve been can no longer carry us forward. The structure breaks, the beliefs unravel, and the old protections no longer work.

 What remains is not collapse – but the possibility of evolution.

And like in the cell, this process is not peaceful. It’s often turbulent, we cry, we run away. We feel like strangers in our own skin, waiting to morph into someone we haven’t met yet.

But beneath it all: a restructuring is taking place. Our nervous systems, our inner narratives, our ways of being – they are adapting to help us survive, grow, and thrive in a new context.

Pain is not just a symptom.

It is a signal, a teacher, and a threshold.

Prigogine’s work proves that instability is not failure. It is a necessary stage in the evolution of a system. So, when you are crying on the floor, listening mournfully to Lana del Rey on repeat or angrily powering through your gym routines - just remember: You might be standing at your own bifurcation point.

What do I do at my bifurcation point? Step on the cracks in the Pavement

A message I’ve been thinking about lately is this:

Often (not always), the version of someone we experience is shaped by the environment we create for them.

We carry a responsibility and an opportunity to create the safest, truest spaces we can. For others. And for ourselves. When we do, we often meet more authentic versions of everyone involved.

Living with pain can feel like stepping on the cracks in the pavement. Never quite landing in step. Never quite inside the next square. Not flowing – instead existing awkwardly mismatched with time.

The lesson here is not to skip over the cracks. I am inviting you to live there for a while with love. Give yourself the safe space you need to sit in the discomfort. To let the instability of pain be what it is: part of becoming.

Allow yourself to live on the cracks of the pavement, to feel what hurts, to create a new equilibrium.