Hardship Ignited My Transformation
Here is what pulled me out of my grief.
If we crossed paths 4 years ago, you wouldn’t have recognized me. I was adrift. Not invested in learning or growing. I was sleepwalking through life. Not using my time wisely. Not exactly failing but not succeeding either. At least not by any measure of where I am today.
But all that changed over night.
My father died and I saw how quickly life could be snuffed out — even from a force of nature like him. That was a brutal wake up call, and pivotal moment that began my transformation.
My coping mechanism was to start reading, voraciously. I literally couldn’t get my hands on enough books.
I remember my partner looking at me with concerned confusion after months of Amazon’d dog-eared books were stacked up on every surface in the living room.
In hindsight, I can see it for the trauma response it was. A need for me to retroactively exert some level of control over a situation in which I was completely helpless.
You see, I felt like I didn’t know enough, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I hadn’t paid close enough attention, that I wasn’t able to change the course of my dad’s illness.
So reading became the antidote to my feelings of inadequacy. I guess subconsciously I’d decided that if I learned enough, I would never be so devastatingly caught off guard again. That I could shield myself against the volatile external world that had just flipped mine upside down.
Knowledge had become my trusted guardian. And the strange thing is that it started working.
Reading pulled me out of my grief, fortified my mind in ways I couldn’t have fathomed and restored hope where there was only despair.
I had inadvertently catalyzed my own self-transformation. And in doing so, I started thinking about the old Sarah I was shedding.
I thought about the growth I’d experienced, the pain I’d begun transmuting to purpose and the new state of consciousness I was entering. And the same old question kept gnawing at me:
Would I trade all this to have him back?
My dad’s life in exchange for my “rebirth”.
Would I return all the growth, pain and turmoil to have him back here with us? Part of me wanted to say yes, obviously. But as much as I yearned for this, the past remains unchangeable.
And since I couldn’t ever actualize a “yes”, I resolved to keep improving, learning, adapting and evolving. So that the answer could only ever be “no.”
Difficult times are how we define ourselves. And I’m not going back to who I was before. That person was a fraction of who I am today.
From tragedy, I was given a gift that has made me so much more deliberate about how I’ve chosen to live. It was a heart-wrenching type of awakening that provided me a launching pad to live more meaningfully.
And I will never let that lesson and the heavy price I paid to learn it go to waste.
