It’s Time To Realize That Your Suffering Is Not What Made You A Good Person

In high school, we were taught that the human cell regenerates every seven years on average. The human body behaves in a way snakes do—we shed our own skins and we become, biologically, brand new people. The change in us may not be visible, intangible to most of us, but we are all changed completely in more ways than we can think of. Forever. In literal terms, any biological change is normal. Change is the only thing constant in this world, so they say.

Remember when you had your first heartbreak and the ones after that? I bet no one told you how fucked up it feels, right? No one could have prepared you for the moments when nights felt colder and longer, when the solitude hits you like thousand speeding bullet trains over and over, and when the longing becomes unbearable. The loss was the very worst. No one has told you the pain would be that excruciating. It’s easy to hate love for its downsides. It’s easy to be devoured by grief and hate. It is easy to be consumed by the negative connotations that come along with breakups and take revenge.

But one day, you saw yourself for what you’re worth. It’s like being reborn. You remembered how to live and breathe. Oxygen felt alien to your lungs, but you welcomed it anyway. You accepted that he is never coming back, but you have a lot of things ahead of you. You looked forward to better tomorrows and hoped for a love that deserves you and that you deserve.

Remember how you seemed to have been thrown off balance by people who wished you would fail? People who only saw you for your ineptitude, mistakes, and incoherence? People who reduced you by virtue of their judgments instead of looking beyond the surface? These people are the bane of your existence, and they have the disobliging habit to rip the balance you had apart.

You questioned how it became a norm to thrive in an ecosystem where people throw you negative criticisms and snide remarks, assassinate your character on a regular basis, and treat you with complete disregard. You have become numb, which in itself is both liberating and self-destructive.

But you never changed your commitment to your work, the passion and dedication. You started having a mindset that things will take a positive turn. At the end of the day, nothing lasts forever and nothing stays the same. You cling to that promise and continue to thrive by proving them wrong with your small successes. You prove your vulnerability is not suffering in itself but an indication of you being human, prone to making miscalculations but knowing how to find ways to make it right.

It is not true people don’t change. Science would argue a change is literally the only constant in this world. Figuratively, our past is also morphing, growing, and dying which puts our present in so much limbo. It is people’s stubbornness not to change which is unnatural; the way we cling to things for what they were instead of letting them be for what they are or the way we hold on to old memories instead of creating new ones.

Change is a wheel that will constantly turn. You may be suffering right now, but believe me, it’s not what made you a good person. Change did. We change how we see things and how we hold on to them. It’s like opening our fingers and loosening our grips to experience another chance at life, at love. It’s like experiencing the death of something in the past and being liberated from its shackles so we can be free in the present.

We change for the better. And how we experience change depends on us.