The last almost two years of my life felt very transitional for me. My husband and I hadn’t lived in a place that we knew was a more permanent residence since March of 2019. We, just two weeks ago, moved into our first home, and even that is still taking time to feel like home. Our last residence I REALLY disliked living at. We had pretty rough neighbors and didn’t live in the best part of town. I felt so out of place and uncomfortable for the whole year we lived there.
Security and comfort are a big deal to me. I am a very paranoid person, and I am a blue (2, INFJ, 6, etc.) so comfort is a huge priority in my life. I basically felt like I was living in a nightmare for the last year of my life. Where we lived was not what I expected it to be at all. I felt really trapped and fragile. Put a pandemic on top of everything else I was feeling and I was even more sensitive to what was going on around me and where we lived.
Life really felt discouraging, as I’m sure it did for pretty much everyone. I just couldn’t believe that this was seriously how 2020 was going to play out. In a crappy townhouse, in a weird part of town, stuck at home because of a pandemic. What the heck. I could never have envisioned this ever in my life. It was almost comedic how this year went down.
Despite all my venting in this post, I have actually had a realization today. While I was feeling extremely discouraged I had a thought about hardships in life. There have been multiple times in life where I felt really stuck. I didn’t know where life was heading, I had no idea what direction to go in life. But always in those moments, I would feel a sense of excitement. At some of my lowest times I knew something great was coming. It may not be a huge “aha” moment, it may be gradual events that I notice over time are building me up to a better place, but something is always coming that’s great. You may go through a hard time in life that lasts a day, or a week, maybe even a year or two. But no matter what there is always something good that is coming.
I don’t know how to kickstart the greatness that is yet to come, but I am excited to open myself up to growth and opportunities. I am excited to go through these hard times in life to see what they are preparing me for down the road. There is so much that we can learn from our hardships.
I hope that 2020 will lead to growth and understanding with people. We have all experienced a pandemic together, and we’ve all faced unique and difficult challenges and changes because of it. Despite all of that I really want to see the growth that could come from this crazy year. How have people been motivated? How have we been forced to think outside of the box? How can we help others around us from our experiences?
Hardships are good because they lead to growth and opportunity if we look for it. Tell yourself you can do hard things, because you can. Life wasn’t meant to be ideal all the time. It wasn’t meant to be fair. Life is meant to be lived, and you are supposed to learn from it. Learning usually comes from getting out of our comfort zone. It comes from experiencing all that life has to offer. So the next time life is a crap shoot remember that there are exciting opportunities to be had if you can learn from these hard times.
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