It’s Your Deepest Pain That Makes You Grow

Tobi Dami

It’s the hardships that make you strong. It’s the heartbreak that makes you fearless in love. It’s the disappointments that make you wise. It’s the challenges that make you determined and it’s not getting what you want that makes you appreciate what you already have.

Pain is inevitable. Getting hurt is an essential part of life because that’s how we grow and that’s how we learn. That’s how we figure things out. That’s how we discover ourselves. That’s how we know who truly loves us and who is just pretending.

Without pain, we would be blind. Without pain, we would be sheltered. Without pain, we wouldn’t have learned how to fight life’s toughest battles.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not romanticizing pain or saying it’s something beautiful. Pain is terrible and sometimes it can really disturb us and affect us in ways we can never really get over but there’s also nothing we can do about it.

We can’t control pain. We can’t decide that our lives will be free of pain and so we must find the silver lining. We must find the message behind our pain. We must understand how this pain will help us get to the pleasures we’re seeking eventually.

Because the greatest pain of all is not learning how to survive, the greatest pain is expecting to play it safe all the time and hoping the world will play it safe with us too, the greatest pain is getting injured every time someone pushes us and the greatest pain is having open wounds without knowing how to heal them.

And we’re here to learn, we’re here to evolve, we’re here to make mistakes and try to make things right again, we’re here to mess up so we can get our shit together, we’re here to live in contradictions and learn how to find balance. We’re here to make sense of senseless things and find order in the middle of chaos and find what makes us happy when we’re sad and what makes us shine through the darkness of it all.

Because life is contradicting like that, you have to fail before you succeed, you have to lose before you win, you have to doubt yourself before you learn how to love yourself and you have to accept pain if you want to find happiness.

And if you think about it, pain makes you more compassionate, more self-aware, more forgiving, more tolerant. It hardens your core yet softens your edges, which in my opinion, is the best way to live a healthy and balanced life.

If we had the option to live without pain, we’d all choose that, but we don’t have that option so we might as well choose to live with it. Choose to make it our friend instead of our enemy. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.

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Writing makes me feel alive. Words heal me.

Keep up with Rania on Instagram

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