fear of feeling

It is a commonplace that art requires pain: an artist who lives a pleasant and fulfilling life, without having to struggle, without experiencing suffering, is unlikely to provide important contributions to art.
I tend to agree on this, even though exceptions are always possible, but now I am interested in another question. Is pain an indispensable and valuable component of any human life?

In a sense, the answer may be considered obvious in this case as well, and the argument could roughly go along the following lines: a life without pain is going to make pleasure look like the norm, and hence less pleasurable. That is, a life without pain is going to be bland and boring, therefore pain is indeed an indispensable and valuable component of human life.
However, the sketch of the argument above has clear problems. A life without pain is a life filled of pleasant but also of neutral events. Hence, pleasant events will be still differentiated by other kinds of events, and need not become the norm, neither in a qualitative nor in a quantitative sense. A life without pain could be more boring, comparatively less exciting than one in which pleasure is alternated to pain, but not necessarily bland.
And of course I am not the kind of person who can endorse a merely hedonistic perspective. Values cannot be reduced to sheer amounts of pleasure and pain, even when the pleasure is of the noble kind. (When I say “can” I mean here only a psychological can: it doesn't seem to work for me to think in those terms; but I don't have any argument to show that my axiology cannot ultimately be accounted on hedonistic grounds)
But it's not even this that troubles me right now. Because, again, there could be a lot of neutral events, neither painful, not pleasant, which could provide enough value to my life: knowledge, without struggling for it, seems still very valuable, for instance.
What I am wondering is whether my emotional life could thrive without pain. Can I live a valuable life without experiencing painful emotions? (and yes, I am aware I moved from 'human being' to 'I', and from 'any human life' to 'my life'; it reflects more honestly my current motivation, and it's a good beginning for a more universal inquiry)

In the few recent years, the grip of pain that I used to feel on me has been released. In part it was time; in part it was change; in part I was lucky; in part I have grown wiser. Whatever the reason, things have changed. I cry rarely, and most of the time for quite trivial, stress-related reasons. My moments of sadness are ephemeral. My memory of the past is much more sweet than bitter. I am learning to let go. I look forward.
An unforeseen result of such a longed-for outcome, though, is that I have grown unaccustomed with pain. And I dread it.
It began in a subtle way. I stopped desiring to read certain books, or I stopped in the middle of one that was making me feel uneasy. Or, if it was really a good one, I went on, but I almost regretted reading it. I asked to friends, before watching a certain movie, if it contained too much cruelty. I stopped thinking that art isn't good if it doesn't hurt. I began watching tv shows. Only the ones that don't make me queasy.
Recently I have been planning a trip with Shen-yi. And my requests were shaped not, as usual, by the need for a basic material comfort (no couch-surfing or dumpster-diving, please!), but rather by the fear of any emotional discomfort. No begging children, no baby prostitutes, no mutilated homeless, no starving elderly.
Many people reacted unsurprised: of course, you are going on vacation!
Except that I am not. I want to travel, not vacation. I want to experience, discover, learn.
But I told myself: the only value of seeing starving, mutilated, sold children is in knowledge, but since I know these horrors, I don't need to see them.
Some objected: you can't know what it means, you can't know them 'objectually' (my coinage, maybe, in opposition to 'propositionally'), if you don't see them.
And I replied: my imagination is vivid, my sympathy is developed, that's why knowing is equivalent to seeing.
But if that's were true, of course, I could see (say the objector within me).
And yet I can still add: but even if it doesn't feel the same, it doesn't matter. Feeling people's suffering is valuable only instrumentally, and not in itself.
But is this true? Let's assume that I do everything I can to help people who suffer (which, by the way, is false), and that there is no other end for the sake of which it's good to feel the pain of others. Is there still an intrinsic, non-instrumental value in feeling someone's else pain? And is there an intrinsic value in feeling pain in general?
I don't know the answer. But I suspect that there is more than one reason to think that feeling pain and experiencing negative emotions is conducive to and/or constitutive of value. Giving ten more dollars to charity may be the most trivial. I pledge to discover the others soon enough.