I Gotta Get Through This...

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."

Eleanor Roosevelt 

Let's face it... Sometimes life just sucks!

Maybe you're like me. One minute you are cruising along and it's almost like someone just punched you in the guts. Something happens that leaves you gasping for stability and any glimmer of hope. It's like we are trying to find our breath when we have been plunged under water.

It can happen in an instant. You find yourself at the end a relationship, a child gets sick, your baby is born prematurely, you find out you have cancer, you've been retrenched, a parent dies, a friend betrays your trust. The list goes on into the infinity. These are the moments in life that take your breath away for all the wrong reasons. 

What always fascinates me in my life is the initial choice that awaits me. I can either run away or face it head on. When I say run, I mean emotionally run. I don't have to face this at a deeper level. I cannot be present in the moment (this is the easy part) or I can chose to engage in the process. Encounter the pain, the hurt, the anger, and all the emotions (this is the hard part).

There is no doubt about it that the latter in my mind is the hardest thing to do. It is hard because it requires that we encounter the emotion and sit with it. It allows it to do its work with us and then it requires that we come out on the other side. There is no magic wand we can wave to make the time move quicker or the emotion less intense. It is the process of just being in it. 

However, we come on to the other side of our encounter we find something about ourselves. We find a depth we never knew was there and we find a strength we never knew existed. We find that this resilience gives us a new understanding regarding the world we live in. 

So when the next thing turns our world upside and inside out, we can draw on this strength. We can find that although this is hard to deal with, we have been through so much and we will get through this again.