Pearl is used to pain
The pain of coming into existence for the very first time, building a solid body and landing on the ground and smiling at the supervisor, who only glare back at you, grabbing you by the arm roughly and sending you off to the next gem for inspection .
The pain of being hit and yelled at by the next gem, during the inspection, because you simply can not act the way they want you too and now they've also seen that you gem is on the head, that it's oval, that it's wrong, and they inspecting gem is somehow screaming even more and for the first time you get to here the word that would come to define you for such a long time: Defective. As in you are defective and a defective gem is worth nothing. you are worth nothing.
Pearl knows the pain of being picked up, when you're in piece. The pain of someone crying over you and asking you to heal, when you know that you can't, because the hammer that smashed your pieces to even smaller pieces one to many times and now there's no way back, even though you want to, because someone think you can.
The defective Pearl has known the pain of love and it's cost. She had felt pain of giving everything you have, everything you are and everything you'll ever be just to be able to feel a fraction of the love in your heart being given back to you by someone else.
She learned how fighting in a war will give you a whole new perspective on the word pain, and how much it hurt to know that there is someone who cares if you live and die in every battle, but still you can not care for yourself because being careful and ensuring your own survival has never helped you to ensure the survival of those that actually matters.
Pearl, no longer having the word defective attached to her (according to Rose) beautiful name anymore, learned to know the pain of losing the only thing that ever mattered to you. The pain of knowing, that the only thing that made you pull through when it really mattered, is gonna disappear. That one day, your gonna wake up and she is not and cannot be there anymore.
Pain, for her, was to see, to touch, and to hear that baby living in their house. To take care of it and watch out for it and just be there for it...until the day she realised that he has replaced her and she was perfectly fine with that because he's her lovely little boy and his love is so different from his mother's but still oh so wonderful. Then it hurts because it feels like Rose is watching her from somewhere far away and cry for Pearl forgetting her and letting Steven take her place in her heart.
Pearl has known a lot of pain in her life, but at some point she learned that it was okay. It was okay because she was free, and she had a family that loved her. For all the pain that she had felt, she had eventually gained something, something weirdly precious and for that she was happy to take all the pain.
Because it was okay.
