on discovering my personal mission, question 12

Life on Purpose: 15 Questions to Discover Your Personal Mission

Question 12: What were some challenges, difficulties and hardships you’ve overcome or are in the process of overcoming? How did you do it?

I think this question asks me to reveal more than I want to, in a public forum. Moreover, just because I’ve succeeded in overcoming difficulties, hardships, doesn’t mean I’d ever, in a million years, want to repeat any of it. I found no joy in the challenges and feel no sense of triumph in having overcome so much adversity. I’ve made peace with my past but I have no doubt I am the worse and not the better for what I’ve had to deal with in life, even if dealing with it has given me an opportunity to develop certain strengths, resilience, etc. I guess I don’t buy the whole Nietzschean philosophy; I don’t believe for a minute that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I am no longer bitter, angry, etc., but I do feel “weakened” by what I’ve gone through, diminished some how.

I think what’s really helped me in dealing with stuff, even stuff I should never have been asked to deal with, is learning to live and to speak my truth. I feel good when I do it, horrible when I don’t.

Of course there are ways to do it that get you where you want, and ways to do it that make everything worse. So I’ve learned to speak my truth calmly, not forcefully. It’s my truth, no one else’s, necessarily.