Losing Track of Pain

The room tilted slightly when I opened the rejection email. It was for a paper I had been revising for more than two years. The air felt unusually sharp, as if I had inhaled too quickly, and for a moment it seemed that the blood had drained from my head. I noticed the sensation almost clinically: the way pain spreads through the body before it forms a thought.

It had been a while since an emotion arrived with this kind of authority. My throat tightened, close to tipping into tears.

I was sitting in a seminar room at an institute I rarely visited, involved in a collaborative project far from my own field. I was there for the day because I was expected to be. The setting demanded a professional composure stricter than in my usual office, and I assumed I would have to carry the pain intact through the hours that followed.

The morning continued. Slides changed. Speakers rotated.

What surprised me was that the pain did not remain constant. As the seminar unfolded, I found myself listening more closely than I had anticipated.

One talk shifted into vaccine design. I realized, with mild embarrassment, that I did not even know what an adjuvant was, and assumed I would not follow much of what came next.

That expectation shifted when the speaker stepped back to sketch his own research background, as if recalibrating the talk for listeners like me.

He spoke about vaccines against plague, the disease once responsible for the Black Death. The story unfolded through images rather than arguments, including the well-known illustrations of the beaked masks worn by medieval doctors, reminders of how differently the disease had once been understood. As for treatment, he explained that antibiotics had been so effective that vaccine development was long set aside, and medical strategy followed that success. His institution, he added almost in passing, had produced plague vaccines before later discontinuing production in line with that logic.

What had seemed obsolete, he suggested, was in fact conditional. Changing circumstances—resistance, re-emergence—had returned attention to questions once considered closed, and for that reason plague vaccines were being reconsidered.

It was genuinely interesting in a quiet, unexpected way. The story held my attention, and during the break I found myself searching for additional information, following terms he had mentioned only briefly.

None of this intersected with my work. Still, while trying to follow the explanation, I noticed that the tightness in my throat had eased. The pain from the morning did not vanish, but it lost its urgency. For a while, it no longer demanded attention.

The effect was temporary. By the time I returned home, the rejection was still present, dulled only partially by fatigue and sugar.

Yet the experience during the seminar stayed with me. I had not chosen to attend out of curiosity, nor had I expected it to offer relief. Still, immersion in an unfamiliar world—listening, concentrating, briefly understanding—had loosened something, if only briefly.

I don’t know why it worked, or whether it would work again. But perhaps pain recedes not when it is addressed, but when attention is fully occupied elsewhere.