In the middle of them, difficult seasons feel endless. From the other side, they look like the curriculum of a woman being prepared for something extraordinary.
In the middle of a hard season, no one tells you anything useful. People offer platitudes. They tell you it will pass, that everything happens for a reason, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. None of it helps, because in the middle, you are not looking for meaning. You are looking for a way to get through Tuesday.
It is only afterwards — sometimes long afterwards — that the shape of what you went through becomes visible. And from the other side, the hardest years do not look the way they felt. They felt like destruction. From here, they look like preparation.
I do not believe that suffering is sent to teach us. I find that idea cruel, and I refuse it. But I do believe that we are not destroyed by what we survive — and that the woman who comes through a hard season carries something the woman who went in did not have. Not because the pain was a gift. Because she made something of it.
The hardest years teach you who actually shows up. They strip away the relationships that were conditional, the roles that were borrowed, the versions of yourself that could only exist when things were easy. What remains is truer. Smaller, perhaps, but real. And real is what lasts.
They teach you that you can do things you once would have sworn you could not. That your threshold is further than you thought. That the woman you were afraid you would become in the worst moments is not the woman you actually are — she is braver, steadier, more resourceful than the one who feared her.
If you are in a hard season now, I will not insult you with a reason. I will only tell you what I know to be true: you are being prepared, even if you cannot feel it yet. Not by the pain, but by your refusal to let it be the end of your story. The woman on the other side of this will understand something about herself that cannot be learned any other way. And she will be extraordinary.
Stop. Pause. Spray. Overcome.
