Your Most Difficult Moments are Your Most Important Lessons

This is something that I learned the hard way. The hard way to learn this big lesson is by trying to go around the lesson, rather than through it. 

The only way to get to the other side of something is to go through it.

We spend our lives trying to avoid pain. We try so hard that when we are finally cornered with no place to escape, we realize we are completely ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Even inside of the situation we can’t escape, we are looking for ways to ignore the pain so it hurts less. It’s like when your mom grabbed your chin in her hand. Her thumb gripped onto one cheek, the other four fingers clamped onto the other. She pulled your face close to hers so you had nowhere to look but her eyes, and as a final act of rebellion, you shifted your eyes away so you didn’t have to see hers. Yeah…I’m betting that did not turn out well for you…

Neither does attempting to avoid painful moments. The thing is, we all have those lessons to learn and, unfortunately, they are completely unavoidable. In fact, the act of avoidance actually has the opposite effect of dampening the pain because it is now a sac of confusion, misery, avoidance, and general awfulness that you carry with you. You know it’s there. You can feel it and it can feel you and someday you’ll have to deal with it anyway, in some shape or form. Only by then it’s just so much bigger and that sac becomes a mountain. Sifting through all the layers of a mountain would seem like such a task that one could never accomplish.

The beautiful thing that you never realized is that your most precious lessons in this life lay within those moments you think you can’t handle. Once you have accepted these situations are what they are, and you build your strength to face them head-on, and you begin to peel back those agonizing layers, only to realize there are so many more…until there isn’t. You get to the center and it’s brilliant there. It has a light that you never knew was waiting there for you.

And then you’re on the other side. 

I hit rock bottom and it was awful and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was all for nothing and if I had to do it all again, I would rather die a thousand deaths than go through that again.    —said no one ever.

I hit rock bottom and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I had not gone through that difficult time, I would never have made it to where I am right now. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t even hesitate.