Dear Kiantha: Positive lessons can come out of challenging times

Dear Kiantha,

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. My life is a mess, and bad things are always happening to me. Sometimes I just want to give up.

Dear Friend,

Believe it or not, everything – and I do mean everything – that happens to us is actually happening for us. Over my lifetime I can recall periods where life seemed to throw me curveball after curveball.

During a seven-year period, I seemingly glided effortlessly between traumatic situations, one after another. Along with the rest of the world, I crawled my way through the pandemic, having caught COVID-19 twice within a six-week period. During this time, I lost close family members to COVID including my mother-in-law, whose funeral we had to have outdoors because of the pandemic restrictions.

Grief’s spiky tentacles extended beyond the pandemic reaching over into the next few years as I lost two of my best friends (both in very traumatic ways) and my grandmother. I was exhausted and I too had surmised that “bad things kept happening to me.”

What I now understand is that everything that happened to me, as difficult as it was, actually was happening for me. In the midst of trauma, I was growing my resolve. I learned how to scrape from the tiniest morsel of hope. I learned to dig deep and to trust my ability to survive.

That is not to say that that time in my life was not hard and often very heavy, because it certainly was. But two things can be true. I now know things about myself that I could only learn through hardship. I now know through experience that my ability to navigate through what felt like all manner of hell was my saving grace. A superpower and a gift that will serve me the rest of my life.

Look critically at everything that is happening to you and know that you are surviving it all. To thrive you must be able to survive all that life throws your way and you are doing just that.

Life will continue to be filled with surprises, some that will take our breaths away and others that will confirm our resilience and fortitude. In either case, it remains true that with each life experience we grow and move closer to our highest self.

We can never give up. We got this.

Soul to soul,

Kiantha

Dear Kiantha can be read Fridays in The Spokesman-Review. To read this column in Spanish, visit spokesman.com. To submit your questions, please email DearKiantha@gmail.com.