My daughter said she worries because she has not experienced that much hardship. She is scared that “when something really bad happens, I won’t be able to handle it.” But just because we feel like we haven't had pain, doesn't mean we haven’t. What it means is that we survived it. I reminded her that she went through a period of bullying, where she truly doubted herself. Friends broke her heart, multiple times. She has witnessed loved ones struggle with mental health & addiction. She attended a funeral at a very young age. The list goes on. Because she persevered, to her these did not fit the “something really bad” category.
What we survive, when we reflect, may not seem as hard as it was. It becomes the past. But what we survive also becomes our strength and reminds us that we CAN handle it.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes:
“Once when [our daughter] was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequable distribution of bad news. In the 9th grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide. In the 11th grade she had been woken at Susan’s at 6:30 in the morning to learn that [her cousin] had been murdered. “Most people I know at Westlake don’t even know anyone who died,” she said, “and just since I’ve been there I’ve had a murder and a suicide in my family.”
“It all evens out in the end,” John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn’t he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.
Several years later, after Susan’s mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end. I said I remembered.
“He was right,” Susan said. “It did.”
I recall being shocked. It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us. Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood. I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” John said.
...
If none of us is immune, for ‘bad news’ certainly does come to us all, do we then sigh with relief when we look back on the bad we have already had? And hope that the more we have endured, the more we have paid our dues?
Let’s choose to say yes. Be grateful for what we have survived, but know there is more to come. Understand that we all get hit with the bad, so then cherish the good.
And most of all, not get bogged down in the small.
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