Maybe Things Have To Go Wrong Before They’ll Go Right

I doubt you’ve heard it anywhere, a sentence where satisfaction goes along with mistakes. A phrase where joy is directly proportional to how much you will screw up. A story where the more you gave love, the less broken you ended.

As young adolescents, you think life is clear. Success equals happiness. Mistakes are not fun. Work hard and you shall receive. Love and you shall be loved.

As adults, we realize this is not always true. Life can sometimes, most of the times actually, go unplanned. Put you in places you never saw coming. Change the rules of the game. Change your feelings and dreams and destroy your most sacred, most solid innate beliefs and sometimes even only in one situation, in one minute.

It doesn’t become weird then to say that we feel lost. We don’t know the right from the wrong. We do not feel like we are enough. We work and our work is not satisfying enough. We make mistakes but they don’t seem to make us better people. They seem to only make us suffer. Bad things in our lives seem like they’re just bad things. Like there’s nothing more to them.

However, from time to time one manages to get a glimpse of hope in this life and sometimes it’s not only a glimpse. Sometimes it’s the reason you live. The reason you continue to do something despite the infinite amount of self-doubt and the crazy fear you have.

And sometimes when this happens you might remember how all your past experiences in life tell you that your pain is going to be as great as your hope. And when things don’t go as planned. When everything is not going to be okay. When you’ll still have to cry yourself to sleep sometimes because you can’t take how things have been or can’t understand what wrong has been done there’s a different kind of pain.

A pain that doesn’t go hand in hand with hope but rather than this, it follows it around. It declares the absurdity of hope. To tell you how wrong you have been to count on something so fragile. To think that dreams do come true or love won’t betray you.

But to me, there’s something more to hope than all the past experiences in our lives where our hope and efforts and love failed us.

To me, the one person I loved and put all my belief in only to be let go of by him later was more than a sign of breaking the myth of love. He was a sign of my big heart. Because I forgave him. Because I took the pain and moved on. Because I could only yet remember something good about him, enough to not hate him.

To me choosing the wrong person to get my heart attached to was not just a reason to cry the pain out on some terrible lonely dark nights but it was also a reason to know what I deserve. To get that the ability to love is such a gift one shouldn’t let go of no matter how unreciprocated it was. To understand myself better. Something I’d not have known otherwise with accepting the love I only think I deserve.

To me going terribly wrong, and having the obvious so hazy before my eyes that I had to fall and delay my own journeys only because I refused to listen and thought I knew more than I really did and was too proud to ask for guidance.

To me making those stupid mistakes and letting go of one’s dreams when I had the perfect best chance to follow them just because I didn’t believe in myself enough then or I didn’t think they’re worthy of being followed.

To me all the flaws I’ve made by myself only to carry them as the heaviest load later and to have them visiting me as regret and fright and more lack of self-belief sometimes, and as much as they have given some of the most unexplained sadness, all of this have also given me a desire. A push to not be the reason I feel this sadness again.

They have given me the perfect guide to what I want because I had already tasted its loss. They have given me the happiness I needed when they showed me the way, so indescribably clear, to its opponent.

I doubt you’ve heard it anywhere a story where light is dark’s best friend but here is one I’m telling you today.

I can’t tell you that everything is going to happen to you at the right time because it takes so much faith to believe in this. I can’t tell you that everything happens for a reason either because sometimes we’re too earthly and non-divine to understand the wisdom behind many of what we live through. But I can tell you this.

If you work hard enough and analyze a little bit more and go deep even through your most painful scars you get meaning. You understand something. That we had to fall to learn something. That we had to love to grow. That we had to be hurt to be kinder. That we had to suffer to relate to everyone else who has had his heart smashed by life. That we had to reach rock bottom to meet the peak of greatness and realize it. That our most terrible mistakes, if we work enough upon them, can drive us to the greatest happiness.

And to be honest, as young adolescents we were right. Love and effort eventually pay off but as a grown-up, you may need to open your eyes a little more to see how because the results just aren’t always clear.