The Art of Successfull Struggles
For a long time things have been great. But things inevitably change and sometimes not that small going forward bit but an essentially taking away your life kind of way, only leaving pain and loss in it’s wake.
Usually we see that coming. Because even those changes are a process rather than a one time event and usually we try to prevent it from happening. There we try to work through and solve things, fix it somehow, fix it, because we have to!
If there is one thing in my life I have learned, even if I still struggle to accept it, it is that in those cases we can’t.
How is it possible that it hurts so much if it is the right thing? How can the right thing be about loss instead of gain? There you are with your beautiful enhanced life and find it to be - empty. Never really making you laugh. Never really feeling fulfilling. Leaving you lonely and misunderstood. If all of this is right, that shouldn’t be.
Sometimes things have changed in so many small bits and pieces, you have changed, others have changed, tiny, invisible parts have changed, that the whole thing doesn’t fit together anymore. And even if it hurts so much you still feel deep down there’s no way in going back for you.
The inevitable feeling that this is over.
The success of a struggle, I found, is more about acceptance than fighting back. Listening instead of talking.
We hurt, we miss and we hold on to what we’ve lost. But it is already gone. No matter how hard we fight we won’t get it back. It is that holding on to a dead thing that pins us down into the sorrows of loss and emptiness. Sitting beside a corpse of the one person or thing we loved with all what we are. It ain’t talking, it ain’t walking on with us. It ain’t even home for it is and stays dead. And for as long as we sit there in the dust, beside that empty casing, we will always be sitting beside a dead love that won’t respond, watch the others pass us, a dead body the only thing surrounding us.
The successful struggle starts where you get up and leave that body behind. You loved it. And you might still do. You might go to sleep missing and wake up missing but it ain’t be the only thing in your life anymore. And while you will always love it partially and miss it, the pain will subside to a smaller thing beside bigger good ones. You will start to see bits of it that teach you something important for the rest of your life. The break will eventially become an experience. Become wisdom.
Why would I judge life differently?
I do not know where my path leads me. I struggle with lots of things, unsure of where to go, what to do, what do I even like? Everything I want just not reachable for an uncertain amount of time what makes it seem unbearable to wait.
But as I start to get quiet, I realize lots of my struggles are forged in the way my current state bothers me instead of the state itself. I do know what I like, I realize. I just have to listen. And the shop called life might not have my favorite dinner in stock these days but it will restock eventually. I will keep trying dishes until I find something or someone that is amazing. It never uccurred to me that the first restaurant I ever enter has to have the most amazing dish or my taste is ruined forever.
It is enough to go shopping until you find what you are looking for even if it takes a while. Maybe you suddenly change the city, meaning life just changes again and there it is. It doesn’t need to be perfect all the time. I don’t need to know everything at once as long as I keep going.
The only thing I really can’t do is being too busy with struggling to actually listen and work on a solution.
So step down. Get quiet. Ask yourself several times a day what you really, really want. Don’t try to be what you aren’t. Don’t try to hold onto the past. Don’t try to want everything at once.
Enjoy the ride! Follow the voice in your belly and note whatever it was you liked. The list is longer than you thought.
And for those struggling specifically about lost people and feel like they don’t even know who they are anymore: I feel you. But people are not what makes us. Your personality is not lost. It is just so much easier to see ourselves if we have another soul to make ours bounce off of. But you are still there. Listening to others is easy, listening to yourself harder. But keep trying. In this world everything is about experience and traning. I promise you, you WILL hear yourself eventually. Just listen to you instead of the rest. No what ifs. No memories. No others.
What do you hear? That’s you. And whatever it is at the moment, happy or sad, it is wonderful. It is a beautiful thing and it still wants something beside that what is lost. Keep asking for it. You’ll get an answer.
