Sometimes, when I take a few minutes to scan social media and see what people are talking about, I am startled to see so many people sharing their suffering and grief,  almost all them seemingly unaware that everyone reading their posts has suffered also or is suffering now.

Social media has given Americans an opportunity to suffer in public, and suffering rolls across the Internet like a tsunami after a typhoon.

People suffer over their dead dogs, dead mothers, dead spouses and friends, sick relatives, or their own sometimes extreme illness.

I think the most common words I see online are “so sorry for your loss,” a term that now makes me twitchy, it is used so often and seems so strangely remote to me.

On social media and on my blog and Facebook pages, people tend to relate to other people’s suffering to theirs. If someone reports a dog that died there will almost instantly be a slew of messages from people sharing the death of their dogs, recently or some years ago.

They aren’t ready to let go.

As a hospice volunteer, grief sharing sometimes seems troubling to me. Do we give ourselves enough time to get past our suffering, and get used to loss?

Grieving people don’t need to take in other people’s grief, they need to process theirs. I don’t want to steal anybody’s grief or ask them to take a chunk of mine.

If somebody’s beloved dog died, the last thing they need to hear are stories about my dead dogs.

What I always try to remember – with dogs or people – is that every single person reading what I write and about what I suffer has most likely suffered the same thing – or soon will.

No one has a patent on grief or suffering, no one feels it exclusively. We have all felt a loss.

It is the failure to acknowledge this universal connection that bothers me, I think. People often write or act as if they are the only people who have ever suffered.

For me, this misses an opportunity to make a strong connection to other humans.

I have a saying I have up on my study wall: Everyone has it worse than I do.

More and more, I see people sharing the progress of their illnesses and suffering in great detail, even the illnesses that threaten death.

I was thinking about this the other day, and if I know I am about to die, I’d like to blog about it. Hopefully, I’d be beyond needing condolences or sympathy, but it would be a great creative challenge to capture the experience for other people if I’m able.

I am not really qualified to say whether this digital suffering is a healthy thing or an unhealthy thing. I see it brings comfort to people, I also see it enables dog lovers to mourn their dogs for eons, some people suffer online now for many years.

I’ve read more than once that pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice. I guess I believe that. When a dog dies, I’d rather love another one than keep on grieving for the one who died.

I am very reluctant to share my suffering online with strangers, or even with friends. But I’m not uncomfortable writing about it. Being open about my brokenness has helped me to heal from the worst wounds of my life.

I guess I was taught that suffering is a private thing, as is grief, something to hold close to yourself.

It is healthy to talk about grief and to acknowledge it,  the questions are how much and for how long, and how public?

How much do other people really need to know about my suffering?

How much do I really need to tell them? I am allergic to anniversary grieving, it seems to be another way to keep grief alive. I never mark the anniversary of a person or animal who has died.

Maybe it’s a good thing that suffering has come out into the open. It is certainly a new thing.

I make an effort to remember that each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. My suffering is mine, I can’t give it to anyone else or take anyone else’s into my own consciousness.

Sharing suffering or brokenness is an intensely personal experience, there is no one way to do it or one way to respond to it. I usually don’t respond to it in public, I can’t bring myself to say “sorry for your loss,” it is not way too much of a cliche.

When someone I love loses someone they love, I feel bound to do more than post a five-word Facebook message. They deserve a card or a phone call at the least.

Many people suffer from mental or physical illnesses, I see them on social media as well. There is also social suffering – poverty, homelessness, hunger, and lack of basic human needs. Individual messages from people suffering those things are rare to see on social media, perhaps because devices cost a lot of money.

But I think the suffering  I see most often is a different kind of pain, the interior and personal kind – broken marriages, conflicts with children, lost relationships between lovers, friends, and colleagues, between children and parents.

Writing in his book Becoming The Beloved,  author and spiritual counselor Henry Nouwen says the suffering he sees most in his social work is that of feeling rejected, ignored, despised, and left alone.

“We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness,” he wrote, “but when we sense that we no longer have anything to offer to anyone, we quickly lose our grip on life.”

I realize I am much more apt to share the personal pain in my life – the kind Nouwen is talking about – than grief.  It isn’t that there is anything wrong with sharing grief – everyone has to figure this out for themselves –  it’s that I am committed to moving forward with my life rather than looking back.

I am very uncomfortable with nostalgia. I can’t see the future. I live most comfortably in the now.

I never want people to feel sorry for me or be sorry for me. Death is a part of life, not a shock, and life is precious, no matter how short.

I fear that sharing my suffering online with strangers – especially about grief – would enable grieving and prolong it. It might keep it going longer than I would if I were alone with it.

All those messages of support and sorrow on my behalf seem tempting and reassuring. But don’t they also teach us to come back again and again for more? Being comforted is precious too.

For me, the joys of life come from the ways in which we live together and much of the pain of life from failing to do that well.

Everybody suffers,  each in their own way.