The Struggle

I feel like I thrive in chaos and adversity. I handle pressure very well and my fight-or-flight response is to fight 9 times out of 10. I feel like I stress over things in a positive way and the stress itself is what pushes me to get shit done. Whether it's a job, a life event, a tragedy, in the heat of the moment, I show up and know that I can mentally handle any situation that comes my way. I'm not afraid of stepping out of my comfort zone and I have the confidence to try something new if it means getting to where I want to be. I think most of the things I have been able to accomplish are thanks to me stepping out of my boundaries and just giving things a try. I have the drive, the ambition, and the courage to go above and beyond even when I feel unprepared or inexperienced. I think there are multiple factors as to how or why I developed this mentality, but I believe most of it stems from how I grew up.

I like to believe that my siblings and I know know hardship, setbacks, heartaches, and all the many things that overlap misfortunes. We know what it's like to not get things we desired and saw things hitting rock bottom at an early stage of our lives. Without going into detail, we went through several volatile things. I think that's a huge reason why we really value the things in life today. And before I go on, no I am not glorifying our struggles. I wish we never had to experience those things in the first place. I wish we could have learned to value things, like money for example, without having to have experienced the lack of it. The silver lining in all of that adversity is the mental toughness and the perspective gained from overcoming our odds in an uphill battle. We got insight on how things look when they go bad. We didn't understand it then, but growing up made us realize our situation was not as simple as our parents made it out to be. I love my siblings and the fortitude developed through time even if we each still have a lot to personally work on. Everybody does, of course, but I often think about how we've come a long way in our own right and the older I get, the more proud I am of us. It's hard to get out of a hole, but it can be achieved, and thanks to our parents, it did happen for us.

It feels like you gain perspective on life through your lived experiences, though. In the simplest terms, you know what being happy is like because you have experienced some form of sadness. The duality between the 2 is so evident and makes it easy for you to assess those emotions for what they are. The low points in life, often times, are noticeably low, but a part of you knows what the highs have been like at some point of your personal life too. For example, that feeling of stress can be compared to relaxation or relief. Disgust can be compared to admiration. Hate can be compared to love. Shame can be compared to pride, and so on. These are very broad emotions and the depths or levels can vary or intertwine. The point here is that this dichotomy of emotions helps us define and interpret each one. You can measure and know what you feel because you may have experienced the opposite at some point of your life and this is how we typically deduce our state of emotions. We aren't robots and we experience emotions in multiple layers with various other emotions and situations, but this form of reasoning helps you pinpoint what you're feeling. We can pinpoint and find the root of where our feelings come from. I think Butters said it perfectly.

Using the same logic, maybe you know what it's like to have money now because you may not have had it at some point before. Maybe you cherish your car now because you didn't have one back then and experienced the struggle of commuting without a vehicle. Or maybe you appreciate the time spent with loved ones today because perhaps you experienced loss and realized how you took something you had previously for granted. These sort of struggles tend to add value in the things you work so hard to have. I feel like a big part of the human experience is going through adversity to some capacity in order to gain understanding or a better grasp of reality after the fact. Like the saying goes, there is no growth in a comfort zone.

Is it possible to grow without struggle? I sometimes think about what I'll do when I have kids one day and it makes me fear thinking about them going through difficult problems. And then I wonder about how I will have to instill certain life lessons and values into my children without them experiencing shitty circumstances. Right now, I feel like I lack the understanding on how to effectively do that with kids. I'm sure there's a way to teach children how to value money without making them go through poverty. I personally learned that lesson through lived experience, but I question myself, "how can I have my kids understand that lesson to the same degree as I did, if not, better?" I used to think things like, "my kids will have a flip phone until they get a job and earn a smart phone like I did growing up," but now I feel like that's a very simple-minded and flawed concept. I understand the approach, but the execution seems a little silly now. Maybe I'm wrong. There must be an effective way(s) to be able to give your child the best and teach them what it took to be able to provide the best, without all that shitty, manipulative parenting where they guilt kids as if parents aren't supposed to provide. I'm still figuring out this part for my future kids.

Back to my question:

> Is it possible to grow without struggle?

No, you cannot grow as a person without the struggle. Adversity molds us and I think we forget that giving the world to our kids without explanation to them is actually damaging more than anything else. Coddled children can grow into dependent adults who struggle more when their providers are gone or step back. Not only children, but also our partners, friends, family, and people you work with. We gain qualities such as confidence, competence, and determination through the things we try and often times fail in. But that failure is what promotes growth because you tried. You tried and you learned something new that you didn't know before and then try again until you succeed. It's very easy to stick to the things we know, but overtime that sameness adds less and less value to our lives. Like in that one episode of SpongeBob where Squidward moves. You need to step out to find that value you seek. There needs to be a balance. Sometimes the only person stopping us from growing and reaching our true potential is ourselves.

One quote that has always resonated with me since I was 15 years old was from a book called The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

“But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”

Reframing the way we think, behave, and feel goes a long way when handling adversity. There's a huge difference in thinking:

I can't do this. (Fixed mindset)

and

How can I do this? (Growth mindset)

Cognitive reframing is key and it takes work, but that work pays off when you step out of that comfort zone.