“Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad.  Sometimes traumas are the reason you know how to help,” unknown.  I can’t say I enjoy strife or struggle or even the minor inconveniences of every day with things I feel should just work.  It’s a giant pain in the ass when we think we have all of our bases covered and it all goes left.  But we have to keep perspective and understand that not everything is as bad as it seems and not all inconveniences are the crisis we think they are.  When things got tough, I can’t say I didn’t learn something.  Sometimes the thing I thought was so terrible turned out to be an inconvenience that showed me a different way to get where I wanted to be.  There were events in my life I thought would break me—and some nearly did— that I still stood up from even if it took me a long time to recover.  There were some I know I became a different person, not for the better because I felt weaker after and I still question what the point was.  But then there were moments I know people expected me to stay face down in the dirt and I stood up, I came back, and I kept going.  In those moments, I knew that there was a lesson from whatever struggle I’d just been through.    

We all have a very different definition of trauma at times.  Something that breaks one bounces off of another.  There are no-brainer cases we all agree fall under suffering and loss—the struggle to find food, not having clothes or shelter, dealing with any kind of abuse, critical illness.  But the truth is, it also isn’t up to us what counts as trauma in someone else’s life—it’s all a very relative experience and I think we all have varying degrees of struggle in our lives so we can help each other learn. No, first world problems like not having the color nail polish we want isn’t a crisis, but it can still show us how to gracefully deal with disappointment.  Sometimes we are the example for other people.  Whether that is an example of strength or what not to do depends on the day, but our experiences are definitely lessons for others as well as ourselves.  Inspiration or cautionary tale, well, that also depends on the viewer.  Life is pretty subjective. Those lessons are also a matter of interpretation at times.  It’s up to us what we do with them—do we bend or do we break?  What modifications do we make? Often the point is just to learn that we can get up again, that we are stronger than we thought and can endure more than we believed.     

Humans do this weird thing where we try to one up each other with what’s wrong in our lives. We shouldn’t compete over trauma—we all know those people always trying to prove they have it worse, like it’s some badge of honor to see how much is wrong with them.  We also like to share other people’s struggles.  I have a friend who will tell me what went wrong with her all week as well as what went wrong with all of her friends.  Look, I don’t want anyone to suffer—I really don’t, I think there are plenty of other ways to learn lessons, thank you—but I also don’t think everything we deal with in a week is a crisis.  I also don’t need to invest myself in everyone else’s problems, I don’t need to go looking for issues and I certainly don’t want to create them.  For those I CAN help, I’m all in, 100%, call me and I’m there.  Hearing how you’ve chosen to take the same failed chance and it failed again, or how you’re not feeling well and still smoke, or how you want a certain thing but still repeat the pattern, or how you immerse yourself in other people’s troubles, well that’s a you thing.  Frankly, no one got anywhere actively looking to go further into the shit without trying to find a solution.  That’s the other side of this too—how much of our trauma did we cause ourselves? And is it trauma or drama? If we’re honest, it’s probably 80% of it is drama.

I get tired and annoyed looking at everything from a negative lens because not every little thing a crisis.  Convenience has made us soft and the things we find traumatic really aren’t that big of a deal.  I used drama and trauma as a weapon, thinking the only way I could get attention or get what I need (a day off, my husband to give me a backrub, anything really) was to have something wrong, to create an emergency or a problem (victim).  I didn’t understand that we are allowed to want and to receive what we want, we don’t need to justify why we deserve it.  Our job isn’t to convince the world we earned that reward by going through struggles.  Not all struggle is nobility, sometimes it’s our own stupidity.  But the truth is sometimes we have to go through something really uncomfortable, really painful, really extreme to get the point—which is that we are strong enough to handle what comes our way.  The experience teaches us so we can teach others and we pass down the knowledge.  We grow and expand the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more we can help others.