Without Suffering, There Is No Happiness
“Olive is crushed to make the best oils. Grapes are squeezed to make the finest wines. Roses are pressed to make the most fragrant perfumes. Have you been crushed, squeezed and pressed by life’s trials and difficulties?
Be glad…”
As a minor online influencer, I get a lot of people messaging me all the time asking me questions. Mostly, the questions run in one direction. “I feel so lost, I don’t know what I am doing with my life, I feel like the universe hates me and is giving me an especially hard life, I feel like a failure, what should I do?”
When I hear those words, my first reaction is to smile. Not because I’m cruel, or sadistic in anyway, I don’t like other people in pain. But I smile, because it reminds me of my own trials by fire a few years ago, where I said the exact same things in my journal several times a week. I was lost, I felt alone, I felt like I had lost everything, every identity I owned, I felt like an absolute loser/failure, and I wondered what my next steps should be.
I share this story often with people because people think that I have always known what I wanted to do with my life, because I come across as so powerfully confident in their interactions with me. If they only knew the truth!
Well, that’s why I am constantly sharing my own story of despair and suffering, so that they can realize not only that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but that it might appear sooner rather than later, and only if they keep on going consistently on that miserable path. (more…)