Suffering needs meaning
It may sound condescending; but it’s not.
I never put too much emphasis on age whatsoever, but as I get closer to turning 30, I have this feeling that I become more and more aware of what is happening around me and how I react to everything.
Maybe we are getting wiser with each passing year, but I believe that has more to do with the work we’re willing to do to improve ourselves rather than simply observing life.
Self-improvement takes heaps of consistent work, much like following a certain nutritional adherence in order to get fitter or healthier. It takes consistent and persistent effort, throughout life. It requires study, analysis of information, a will to put into practice what you learn anew and a diligent approach to reinforcing what you’re only learning to practice.
This is my conclusion, after trying to find myself, define myself and redefine what and who I am, repeatedly throughout my early teenager years, early twenties and finally feeling like growing some personality roots in place, as I reach my thirties.
I now have a bigger picture of what my life actually was and currently is; in the past, I thought anguish, fear and conflict (to put it mildly) made me who I am. And I enabled that to define my actions, my attitude, my choices. I thought I was compelled to act in certain ways in order to properly cope with everything that made me squeak with pain. Yes, squeak! It’s the most accurate word I can use to describe what most of my life felt like and how I behaved most of the times.
Don’t get me wrong: I had functioning anxieties with the occasional mildly depressive episodes and some thrown-in hypomania from time to time as well. I finished college; I got a Master’s Degree; I did volunteer work and poured my free time in the values I believed in; I changed careers, became a competitive bodybuilding athlete. But it was a long process to get out of the subconscious waters and into the conscious land of living.
It’s easy to state you have a depression or a shitty life when your attitude is made up in front of things; It’s harder to give it proper meaning and to work with that until you can reach a meadow.
I am now writing from a euthymic phase (it means I am in a balanced state between the poles) — here’s a picture explaining the bipolar spectrum of cyclothymia:
Coming from such a place, I feel responsible to express the following: every suffering needs meaning, in one way or another; it may not be an accurate meaning, it may be tertiary non-sense but it is yours.
I’m not referring to finding meaning in why other people are annoying, why you have been abandoned, why you are a passive-aggressive scumbag from time to time, why you only see flaws in yourself. No!
You need to find meaning to why you have an overly-sensitive mind, why you observe so many things in so many nuances, why you seem unable to become your best friend, how your past created who you are right now, why this mind in this body and with this life, out of all possible combinations. And what you can do next with all the knowledge you posses.
Giving meaning to your personal suffering is not intended to justify your perpetual inclinations to do the same mistakes and to adopt the same attitudes, over and over again.
Giving meaning to your personal suffering should liberate you, offering you a new attitude in front of an old suffering that is there, will be there and will never disappear even if the events themselves have passed.
What does an individual have, in front of pain and extreme suffering, when he has been stripped of everything else?
Well, in the word of Viktor Frankl: “ the last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
