I have been destroyed in a million different ways … and now I know a million ways to heal myself

Destroyed is such a dramatic word! Until my mom died, I might have used ‘destroyed” to describe any semi-major inconvenience. Now that I have lived through true trauma, I can admit that no, I haven’t previously been destroyed a million ways, but I have been hurt & beaten down more times than I can count and that does help fortify your resiliency, armor, and confidence in your ability to ‘get back up & heal yourself again.

But if we don’t take it too literally, this concept is otherwise totally true, right?!

Life sucks. It’s hard. It’s not fair.

No matter how hard we try, we are not going to get through it unscathed! If you have lived long enough to be searching out life or grief support (and thus reading this entry), you have lived long enough to have experienced hurt/betrayal/loss.

Life is SO wonderful, it really truly is – but it can also be a motherf*cker!

It can beat you down and feel relentlessly cruel at times – but you eventually get back up, dont you? Might take days, weeks, or months, hell – it could even be years (and who cares! Don’t count. Grief is a lifelong sidekick friend). You still do get back up – scarred, tattered, and tired – but you’re up! (and I know you’re up because you’re reading this. You are trying to heal)

I’ve had friends who have chosen not to be friends with me anymore. I’ve had jobs that took everything out of me and left me beaten down. I’ve experienced trauma that I don’t discuss but was absolutely life-altering. Those things hurt, deeply! They changed me, for sure! But I kept moving (life doesn’t really give us much choice) and amazingly enough, I made even better friends, healed from my wounds & ended up with a career that I love!

I have a feeling you can say the same thing, can’t you? When you look back on your life thus far – there have been hard moments, unfair situations, and perhaps endured unbearable experiences – but you have survived. And I bet if you look closely (without emotion or hurt), you will see how you’ve overcome, grown from those experiences, and are quite possibly an even better version of yourself than you were before.

When I am in a really bad place, wondering how on earth I am going to overcome THIS, questioning how & why I got here, I force myself to remember all the times I thought something was going to break me and it didn’t. I harness the confidence I earned from overcoming those setbacks & traumas to remind myself that I have been through hard things before and I’m still standing! Granted, nothing I have endured so far is at the level of loss I am living through now – but I am stronger now because of all the times I had to fight & overcome before.

I vehemently hate “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and while my disdain for this phrase is probably shared by everyone, the sentiment itself isn’t wrong. Our ability to overcome adversity is insanely impressive. Of course, no one wants to face adversity, hardship, or heartache – but we will. It’s inevitable. Its life. However, the best way to make those situations “worth it” is to learn from them. Because quite frankly I am not willing to let a sh*tty situation happen and not have something “good” come from it.

I want to encourage you, as I do to myself, to remind yourself of those hard times you’ve already survived and overcome and – even though it all felt impossible at the time – you survived, you figured it out and you rebuilt yourself.

You can do this

I can do this

We CAN do this

I don’t understand why God gives some of us MORE than others (more=hard times).

It feels really disproportionate and unfair at times. But here’s what I remind myself of:

1) I can’t possibly know what God’s plan is for my life – and while it feels really hard, I’m still here and blessed in so many ways so Im choosing to trust Him and not lean on my own understanding

2) I don’t know what other people are going through. Period. Just because I don’t see struggle doesn’t mean there aren’t any … I chose to view everyone with grace and acknowledgment that I don’t know what I don’t know.

My prayer for all of us is to have sympathy (for ourselves & others) and remember that everyone ends up on their own battlefield at some point in life. No one knows how, when, or why – and it might not be to the same degree as yours – but we all have to survive something that is meant to break us. Period.

And what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. #hateitbutitstrue

God is in control and if He has put it in our story, there is a reason, so we will fight, overcome, and become even better for it (whether we see it or not).

XO

Tay