The Healing Words

From Thought Catalog

I know you’re afraid.

The thing about strength is that it’s easy to be strong when the world is on your side. It’s easy to have faith when good things keep happening, but when you’re being tossed about like a canoe on the ocean, when every path you take seems to end in a dead end, faith is hard to hold onto. It slips like a climbing rope through the spaces between your fingers.

Just remember this: there is no way you can fail to make it through this. No really, think about it – no matter what happens, no matter how bad it gets, the sun will still rise tomorrow. It may rise behind clouds of volcanic ash, it may illuminate only the broken splinters of houses destroyed by a hurricane, but the thing about volcanic ash is that eventually it clears. Cities destroyed by hurricanes are eventually rebuilt.

This is your chance. I know it feels like the opposite of that, like the way that you got here was by missing your chance, but my dear friend, this is what life is. You have not missed your opportunity; this is the opportunity, and it is only here in this thin space between getting what you desperately want and losing it that you have the chance to prove to yourself how far you’ve come. Here, you can stand tall and strong, face to face with your demons. To them, you can finally say, “I’m not running anymore”. Face the shit out of this moment, and no matter what happens, you will come out of it stronger, wiser, more forgiving.

I know how it feels to run from the humanity of other people. Terrified of disappointment, we wall ourselves off into tiny cubicles. The walls that we build rob us of so much connection, joy, and happiness – they prevent us from being truly honest, both with ourselves and with others. They prevent us from living fully as the people we know, deep in some desperate place inside, that we really are. Yet we keep building them higher, digging moats where we want to build bridges, because the lie that we tell ourselves is that these walls keep us safe. We try to protect ourselves from pain.

But pain is not inherently bad. Without pain, we would die. We would have no way of knowing that to touch a hot stove is bad, we would fail to notice our broken limbs, our internal injuries, our heart attacks and our migraines. Pain tells us when something is wrong in our lives, when something needs to change. Don’t run from pain – run towards it and when it happens, endure it. Grow through it. It will not destroy you, and it does not have to define you.