101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

often crucial 
FOR HUMAN GROWTH
There have been so many poets and thinkers and philosophers who
have spoken to this idea: the purpose of suffering. The wound
through which Rumi claims the light enters. The beautiful people
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross says had to know defeat and suffering and
struggle to know appreciation and sensitivity and understanding. The
pain Khalil Gibran believes sears the most incredible characters’
hearts. The suffering through which Fyodor Dostoyevsky claims a
large intelligence and deep heart can be born. The people C. Joybell
C. sees as stars: dying until they realize they are collapsing into
supernovas, to become more beautiful than ever before.
Heartbreak may not be responsible for fundamental, biological
human growth, but rather the kind that we also know: in our minds
and of our hearts and throughout our souls. If the philosophers
couldn’t speak to it well enough, surely you’ve experienced
something of the same strain in your own life: the pain that was
crucial to the process, the things that were lost to prepare for those
that would be gained, the excruciating experiences that made you
who you are now.
It’s a phenomenon so many people talk about but most can never
quite define: the catalyst that breaks you open, the rock bottom on
which you build the rest of your beautiful life. The suffering that was
somehow so crucial, you’re grateful for it when all is said and done.
It’s the human equivalent of metamorphosis, the darkness against
which we can finally see light.
It’s my belief that if we could understand why our pain is necessary,
we could bear it with more grace, or at least learn to listen to it
before it forces us to. Here, the 7 reasons why heartbreak is often
necessary for human growth…

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01. Suffering is only necessary until we realize it isn’t, but it
usually takes something to make us realize that.
Pain and suffering are not the same thing; I’m sure you’ve
heard this before. We love pain. We make the same
expression during an orgasm as we do while being tortured.
Crying is cathartic, the physiological sensation of pain
ultimately keeps us alive. It’s suffering that we don’t like.
Suffering is a resistance to pain, and it’s in resistance that we
suffer. We don’t choose what pains us, and that’s a good
thing. We do choose what we suffer for, and that’s even
better. It was always only of our own volition.
02. Human beings think they are seeking happiness, but they are
seeking comfort and familiarity above all else.
People are incapable of predicting what will make them
happy. This is because all we know is what we’ve known. Our
culture, however, is big on “planning” for the future, choosing
our happiness, and chasing it. In an effort to do this, we just
choose something we knew from the past, even when,
objectively, it wasn’t happiness at all. It was something we
desire more: comfort. Until our loyalty to our comfort zones
becomes too uncomfortable to bear, we won’t be forced to
seek something genuinely greater than whatever it is we once
thought was best.
03. Suffering teaches us that trying to change the external world
to be happy is like trying to change the projection on the
screen rather than the projector that’s playing it.
Byron Katie speaks to this beautifully: “Once we realize
where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end
of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.” She
is referring, of course, to our minds, and the fact that we don’t
realize to turn inward until we dig ourselves deep enough into
a dark hole of trying to change what’s outward. Your mind is
the lens through which you perceive the world. You must
adjust its focus to change your life, not the opposite way
around.

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04. Often “suffering” comes to us in the form of a breakdown,
which is really just a breakthrough that we haven’t seen the
other side of yet.
Through learning that sometimes (…oftentimes) we don’t
know what’s best for us, and yet somehow, our subconscious,
instinctive selves do. I’m not claiming to know that there’s
necessarily a divine intervention responsible, but I am
claiming to know that many times even in my own life, I
somehow knew when it was time to break my own heart for
the sake of something greater, even though I didn’t know
what that greater thing was at the time.
05. A capacity to feel joy must be balanced by a capacity to know
pain.
Our world is born of, and exists because of, duality. This is a
fundament of our natural world, but it’s also important to see
in our own lives. The truth is that the greater capacity you
have for darkness is as much contrast through which you can
see light. The yin/yang of our emotional selves is always in
balance; it truly just depends on what perspective we choose
to view things through—both are equally available to us, the
choice is always, ultimately, ours.
06. Pain is a signal that something’s wrong, suffering is what
happens when we don’t heed it.
Physiologically, of course this is true, but it’s even more true
emotionally and mentally. We almost like to create problems
for ourselves out of a very deep belief that we deserve pain
(the bad kind) out of retribution for how terrible we
(wrongfully) believe ourselves to be. It’s only through
grappling with that pain that we realize it was always self-
induced and served mostly just to help us unlearn our need to
create it, to realize why we don’t deserve it, and in the
process of doing so reconnect with who we truly are, not just
what the rest of the world sees us to be.
07. The universe whispers until it screams.

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There is no traumatic experience that is ever a completely singular
event. There is no heartbreak that is ever just the cause of one thing.
It’s the pattern. It’s what the loss compounds on. It’s the final hit that
breaks us open, the moment when we realize that we knew what
was true all along, though something prevented us from heeding the
calls early on. That is what we break through when we break open.
How beautiful, to live in a body and world that allows you to explore
the darkness, but pains you when it’s time to come back. How wild
that nobody tells us about this until we’re in it, or already almost too
far gone.

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WHY WE HOLD 
ON TIGHTEST