Here’s a weird suggestion—be grateful for the pain and suffering in your life.

I know, that’s crazy. Gratitude for suffering? It feels wrong. It feels like you’re saying, “More, please.” Pile on the pain. Stuff my life full of hurt. Break my heart one more time.

I’m not making a call for you to become a masochist. I’m not telling you to enjoy pain. What I want you to do is look at the suffering and anguish and hurt in your life, and recognize it as a driver of change and growth. I want you to see every dark night of your soul, every rock bottom moment, every humiliation as something that propelled you in a new direction, on a new path, that led you to right here and now.

And of course, right here and now may not be so great either. You may be suffering even as you read this. First, my very sincere sympathy, because I don’t want you to hurt. I want you to be full of life, health, joy, and hope. But what I’m proposing is that you may be in the very best place, right this second, to launch into a new and better version of your life than you’ve ever experienced before.

You can embrace it, and grow. Or you can resist it, and suffer greatly. Maybe even do some permanent damage.

Think of suffering like an arrow in your shoulder. The tip is sharp. It goes in with a pretty clean cut. But the barbs prevent it from going back out from the same wound. Your choice is to either push it on through, suffer a bit more pain but keep the cut clean, or yank it out and let the barbs tear the flesh and make the wound ragged. A clean wound heals faster. A ragged wound may never heal at all.

Either way, the arrow is already there. You’re already hit. What you choose next determines the outcome you live from.

That is to say, tragedy and suffering and pain and humiliation—those are all going to come to your life. They’re unavoidable. And you can either see them as something to resist, spend all your energy resenting and regretting and fighting the reality of it, or you can choose to embrace it as a teacher. You can choose to accept that the pain and suffering is happening or has happened, and study it to learn what you can from it. You can use that pain to grow, instead of allowing it to put you on the ground for good.

Easy? No. It’s not. It won’t be. It never will be. It’s hard, and it hurts, and it sucks. But it’s the moment of decision. It’s the choice you and only you can make—”What will I do with all of this pain?”

If you’re a Biblically spiritual person, you might think of this in terms of Jeremiah 29:11—

“For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.”

If that isn’t your thing, maybe you can just realize that all the good and growth you’ve experienced in your life came as the result of the pain you experienced anyway. If you choose not to spend your energy and reserves fighting it, you can learn how to use it. You can learn to be a better you because of it.

Resentment, regret, fear, anxiety, worry—these are all choices. I know, they may not feel like that in the moment. But that’s because they’re the easy choices. The default choices. They take no effort on our part, so it’s simple to fall into them. But if we choose instead the harder choice, the tougher path, the route of embracing our pain willingly and learning from it obstinately, we will grow. We will become so much more than we ever thought we could be.

We will still feel pain. But we rise from it strong.

If you like this post, there’s a blog full of this kind of stuff. And Side Notes is basically an extension of my Note at the End, which you’ll find in all of my novels. And you can find those by clicking here. Share this post with your friends, if you found it helpful. And buy my books if you’d like to support me and my work!

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