The Benefit of Suffering

This post might contain subjects that will act as triggers in some people.

Yesterday, I found this really interesting article linked on Anne Rice's Facebook page, and I thought I'd write out my thoughts on the subject.

For the longest time, I thought that if I just managed to become happy, I could do everything I wanted. I kept telling myself that, if I only got over this depression, my life would be perfect and all the happiness would be mine. I worked harder and harder to reach goals that in the end turned out to be more draining and hurtful than beneficial. My well being was at the mercy of an arbitrary mind, governing my being with unreasonable and often abusive demands.

One paragraph of the article really spoke to me, and this is the one I will be focusing on in this post.

        Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.

- David Brooks, NY Times, April 7 2014

When I was younger, I thought the key to happiness was to belong. To some degree, I still have the urge to belong to something out of the ordinary or even secret. The difference is that now, I can stop those thoughts, take a breath, and remember that I am doing well just the way I am. I have no need to belong to secrets and outcast groups or change to fit into a certain box. As I realized that I can live with just myself and that that is enough, I found it in me to love deeper, to connect more, to other people. The fear of being rejected no longer compels me to be alone. Instead, it pushes me to show more of who I am and to accept that others either like me or they don't. It sounds crass to say, but really, if people can't accept me for who I am, I have no need for them in my life.

        First, suffering drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.

When I crashed head first into a stress induced mental and physical breakdown, many things changed and shifted in me. Before the break, I was convinced that, since I had been subjected to so much mental abuse in my school life, I was supposed to be jaded, emo, and bitter. The break let me have a complete reset of my mind set and I decided to throw the bitterness out the window. I am still living with the consequences of years of mental, verbal, and physical abuse, but refusing to go against my nature let's me take the pain in stride and lets my heart be broken again and again without leaving lasting damage. I would rather suffer a broken heart than pretend to be someone I am not.

Suffering has shown me who I am and has taught me that happiness is not a utopian dream that will come after suffering ends. Happiness and Suffering goes hand in hand in shaping who I am and what I want in life, and that knowledge lets me move through life without being jaded or mistrusting.