Hardship
Pain, loss, and what survives it
Nobody picks the storm. You are here because it found you, or because it has not let go yet.
There is no advice in this room. Just notes from people who were in it too, scratched on the wall for whoever came next. Some of them were in prison camps. Some of them were in a bedroom with the curtains shut for a month. Both count. Read them slowly.
Not untouched. Not unscarred. Not the version of you from the photo on the fridge. But here. Reading this. You got up today, which some days takes more than people know, and you did it anyway. Nobody hands out medals for surviving the thing you survived. There is no ceremony for the month you got through on toast and bad sleep. So have this instead: someone noticed. It counted. It was hard, and that does not make it less of an achievement. It makes it the only one that matters.
Nobody warns you about the middle. The beginning had adrenaline. Everyone texted. There was a plan on the fridge. The end, when it comes, will have relief and maybe a drink. But right now it is Tuesday, and it was Tuesday last week, and the plan on the fridge has a coffee ring on it. This is where people quit. Not because it got too hard. Because it got boring, and nobody was watching anymore, and the only one who would notice if you stopped is you. So, for the record: someone noticed. Tuesday counts. Keep going until it is Wednesday.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Nobody can save you but yourself and you're worth saving.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
What is to give light must endure burning.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.