Why You Should Suffer to Become Stronger
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“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
It’s early morning and I get a call. There’s a dear person of mine crying at the other end. I realize that it’s not good, and I cannot do anything about it. I wish I were on the other side. I wish I knew how to deal with it. In a matter of minutes, my life takes a turn. I don’t know how I should feel. Do I continue with what I was doing, and act normal? The days go by, and I’m still, but there’s a daunting void. I wonder why I cannot make it disappear. It’s been a while. Hello.
Welcoming the suffering
When humans suffer, they suffer inside as a whole — in the mind, heart, and body. Every region of the human being syncs compassionately. This disturbance is what creates pain. In a matter of minutes, the most functional parts of the human stop working, to give attention to a more relevant story — to suffering. When suffering comes, you don’t know how to greet it, how to speak to it, how to heal it. And then it stays for too long, just like an uninvited guest. You have to find your own way to approach it. But how? How?
Watch the stories you tell yourself
My family was about to lose everything in one day. I thought our life was crushing. I thought I would lose them, and nothing outside of it mattered anymore. That was a moment of heightened suffering in our life. At that point, I could not think of anything worse. Then it did get worse, and it did not stop. Murphy’s Law. This was the perfect timing for building my life storyline, and I started on a negative note. I found comfort in victimizing myself, feeding my mind with despair — this was the story of my suffering and I was held hostage in it. I would ask myself, “Why is this happening to me, to us? This is unfair for me to suffer that much”, and “No one can understand me.” That state of mind was becoming more familiar to me, and so I continued boiling it over and over again until it became my life motto.
Now I am looking back, and I cannot convey the emotions I felt back then. That’s because I stopped replaying those memories. I stopped telling myself that story, instead, I built a new story. The story starts like this, “I am accepting what’s happening, I cannot change it, I cannot control it. If it gets worse, I will compassionately accept it, I will be in pain, but I will go through it. Every human being has to go through it. When life pushes, one gets stronger.” I keep the story inside of me, and I replay it. It’s up to me to develop the storyline and my power of acceptance, but it is not up to me to control externalities or bad luck.
Resist nothing
This is the power of the human mind. You perceive the world through the stories you build in your head. I had no control over the external events that were happening to my family and me, so I just accepted them. This was hard to do because this is the opposite of what people expect when bad things happen. You are supposed to react, to condemn suffering. But that was not my story anymore. My story has an important section: “I am accepting what’s happening. I cannot control it.” In other words, resist nothing.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Victor Frankl
Be a spectator, not a condemner. Watch and learn. The more you become aware of the story you tell yourself and the thoughts you feed into it, the more you are in charge of your own life, and the perception of it. I practice this every day, and that makes me feel more prepared for what would come next. I check every week the state of my story and watch the storyline. Am I going the way I want? Or am I going the way of my pain?
Be prepared
Once you suffer, you learn to get your mind and body used to it and develop the capacity to deal with negative thoughts. You are more prepared for the next stage. Sometimes I wonder when will the next moment be. I’m afraid, and probably not prepared, but it’s a new person awaiting the challenge. Remember, you are the embodiment of all the suffering that happened before. You are not the same, and your new suffering will not be the same.
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