The reality of suffering is based on the subjective fact of your own suffering and on the suffering of others which you become aware of through empathy, according to your capacity for empathy which may be innate or learned. When you suffer you wish to cry out, to make an appeal, to invoke an other, an agency, who may have brought it about and who can soothe it, or offer solace and ultimately take it away. Suffering is contingency and social fact. Mental suffering is felt as an action or a choice when it is our own, but seems passive in others, the case of physical suffering is somewhat reversed, but mental and physical suffering cannot be clearly distinguished. While the objective consists of facts that stand indomitably in your way, that you must get around, or else fail to get around, subjective and social facts are thoughts and so are always open to interpretation. Interpretation here is larger than the fact of suffering, it includes what you can think and do, and whom you can address, what questions you are permitted and not permitted to ask. To ask of suffering, "Who suffers?" is to put this entire interpretation into question. You cannot ask this of an other, but you can ask it of yourself. While suffering imposes a limit to your social identity it does not do so in relation to your inner identity for which it is a solvent. There is a fork here which is rarely perceived.