I guess it's also connected to another belief I have, which is that painful situations carry something useful inside them. When something difficult happens, I rarely understand it in the moment. But time changes things. Distance changes things. When I look back later, I can usually see something in it. The lessons it taught me, the growth it gave me, even if none of it was visible while I was in the middle of it.

And I think it's very easy, especially in those early moments, to be quite harsh on yourself. To replay things and think you should have handled that better or you should have done something differently. But with a bit more perspective, it becomes clearer that things are rarely that simple. And often your own thoughts are part of what made it feel so painful in the first place. And I know that can be uncomfortable to admit, but it's also where a lot of learning sits. Because if you can see your part in it, then you can also start to see how things might be different next time.

And I think that's the key thing. You're always growing. You're never the same person twice. So when you think, I wouldn't be able to handle that, you're usually imagining it from exactly who you are right now. Not from the version of you that will exist after more experience, more mistakes, more lessons, more time. Life changes you in small ways all the time. Every difficult moment adds something, even if it's just a bit more awareness or a bit more resilience. So a situation that feels overwhelming now might not land the same way later, because you won't be the same person anymore. You're not static. You're always becoming.

At the same time, I’m learning how important it is to be kind to yourself through all of this. That’s not something I always knew how to do. I used to be far too hard on myself. But we’re all just human, trying to figure life out as we go. At any given moment, we’re doing the best we can with what we know, what we’ve experienced, and what we have available to us at the time. So forgive yourself when you need to. Give yourself grace. Try to see every difficult experience as something that teaches you something about yourself and about life.

Life keeps moving, and we move with it. We gather more experience, more understanding, more perspective. And because of that, we respond differently next time. A similar situation might show up again, but we're not the same person we were before. There's a little more patience there. A little more clarity. More understanding. And so we handle it differently. Not perfectly, not flawlessly, but better. More gently. More consciously. More in a way that feels closer to who we are trying to become. 🩷