A wise man once told me “The struggle is the blessing“. My first thought was “shit, you don’t know what you’re talking about”. At the point in time when those words were uttered to me, I was in the midst of climbing out of a pretty deep, dark hole that I found myself in. Years of suffering with addiction and mental illness had reduced my life to a singular function… escaping the painful reality of my current existence. 

It didn’t start out that way. At first, it was fun and exhilarating. Something that attracted me, almost like the forbidden fruit phenomenon. I can remember as a kid thinking to myself “I will never do that (abuse drugs and alcohol)”. But there was something pulling me towards that lifestyle. It started slow and harmless enough and by the time I realized I’d crossed the line it was too late. I was pickled, so to speak. And once you become a pickle, you can’t go back to being a cucumber. But what I didn’t realize was that this pickle could go on to be something far more delicious than a cucumber. 

There is a phenomenon known as post traumatic growth. The idea is that going through painful experiences can actually place us on an upward trajectory that will take us far beyond anywhere we could’ve imagined prior to the painful experience. There are many pithy clichés that capture this idea, “no pain, no gain “, “you have to crawl before you walk “, and “the struggle is the blessing”. 

Painful experiences are by nature disturbing. The point is not to say that these things aren’t disturbing, however, there exists an opportunity on the other side to change our relationship to pain and leverage it to make us stronger. But this is a choice. We get to choose our relationship to the painful experiences in our life and whether they will make or break us. I was not aware that I was making this choice at the time, all I was trying to do is the next right thing and follow the suggestions of those walking the path ahead of me.

As I write this post, I am sitting in a home that I own, with two children resting in their bed, happy and healthy. A wife who loves me, a career that has placed me in a position of leadership, a graduate degree, and having just started my own company. These are small yet incredibly valuable pieces of my life today and every bit of it comes as a result of me being in recovery. 

I often tell the story of my keys. I have a pretty massive key ring today. It’s hard to keep them in my pocket. I have two car keys, three work keys, a house key, keys to my parents and in-laws house, etc. I remember a time where I had no keys. I had been evicted from my apartment, my car sold, and my family had changed the locks on their homes because of the destruction I had created. I remember sitting in a treatment program with no keys and what it felt like to be reduced to a state of infancy as a grown man.

This experience gives me a new pair of glasses to view my massive key ring. I have a far greater appreciation today and gratitude for my keys. With gratitude comes valuing things in a way that makes life sweeter, something I would never have had had I not lost my keys to begin with. Now I see, the struggle is the blessing.

To return to this idea of “the destruction I had created”, sometimes you have to have destruction in order to have construction. The Yin-Yang, an ancient Taoist symbol, reflects this idea of the interrelationship between light and dark. These states more than co-exist, they rely on one another and are actually imbedded in one another. Yet, we have been conditioned to relentlessly seek to eradicate the dark from our lives so we can bathe in the light. This has deleterious consequences that, in my view, have contributed to the increase in mental health and substance abuse problems. I know it did for me. I chased the light with everything in me and the more I chased it, the more it eluded me because I failed to realize that in order grasp the light, I had to welcome the dark.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls this place creative hopelessness, which suggests that when we connect with the hopelessness of our futile efforts to avoid the dark, a very painful and hopeless realization, we are granted the opportunity to create something beyond our wildest dreams. In other words, the struggle is the blessing.

I will leave you with the story of the butterfly. Before becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar must go through hell. Trudging along the branches, vulnerable to predators and the elements with very little ability to protect herself. Arriving in the cocoon, a caterpillar must struggle intensely to become a butterfly. She must struggle against the walls of the cocoon with all her might in order to strengthen her wings so that one day she may emerge into the light a radiant butterfly able to fly. If one were to cut her from the cocoon before she is ready, she would be too weak and would surely perish. She must struggle in order to become what she was meant to be.