Step one: pain comes in many colours
The first lesson in sudism is that pain comes in many forms. Sudism defines pain in the broadest possible sense: it is any sensation that feels unpleasant in any way. We may instinctively think that hunger, fatigue, headaches, and sadness can’t all be called “pain” since they all feel so different from each other. But they all feel different in the same way that red, green, yellow and blue all look strikingly different and yet are all simply different wavelengths of light. In the same way, these various unpleasant sensations are all simply different “wavelengths” of pain. This is important because it helps us see that all of these feelings are somehow related. As we’ll see later, they are in fact profoundly interconnected.