Sometimes Things Just Suck

We have a habit of looking for meaning when something hurts.

What is this trying to teach me?

Why did this happen?

What am I supposed to learn from this?

Everything happens for a reason, right?

Maybe.

Sometimes.

But sometimes something just sucks.

Not everything that happens is a lesson waiting to be uncovered. Not every difficult experience is secretly preparing you for something better. Not every loss contains a message. Not every shitty thing needs to become a chapter in your personal growth story.

Sometimes you get bad news.

Sometimes someone disappoints you.

Sometimes the thing you really, really didn’t want to happen happens anyway.

And it hurts.

I think we’re often uncomfortable leaving it there.

Especially when we’re used to looking for patterns.

If we can find the reason, maybe we can make the experience feel less arbitrary.

If we can find the lesson, maybe the pain wasn’t wasted.

If we can turn it into growth, maybe we can feel like we got something out of it.

And I understand the impulse.

I do it too.

There is something comforting about believing that everything has a purpose. It can make an unpredictable world feel a little more orderly.

But I don’t believe everything is laid out in advance.

And I don’t believe everything that happens to us was somehow meant to happen.

Life isn’t a story where every terrible chapter was necessary because the ending wouldn’t have worked without it.

Sometimes things happen because things happen.

People make choices.

Bodies do things.

Systems fail.

Circumstances collide.

We get unlucky.

We get lucky.

Other people have agency.

So do we.

There is a lot of uncertainty in being alive.

And I think we can acknowledge that without turning it into nihilism.

Because meaning can still be useful without being mandatory.

You might eventually understand something about yourself because of what happened.

You might notice a pattern.

You might change your mind.

You might make a different choice next time.

You might even look back years later and realize that something painful changed the direction of your life.

That’s okay.

But you don’t have to know that now.

You don’t have to squeeze a lesson out of something while it’s still hurting.

You don’t have to be grateful for the experience.

You don’t have to believe it happened for you.

And you certainly don’t have to believe that you somehow attracted it, manifested it, or failed to learn the lesson that would have prevented it.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is:

This really fucking sucks.

And then you can make dinner.

You can call someone you love.

You can cry.

You can be angry.

You can go for a walk.

You can watch something stupid.

You can do absolutely nothing useful.

You can keep living.

Maybe meaning will come later.

Maybe it won’t.

I don’t think self-trust requires us to know which.

Maybe it means trusting ourselves enough to meet what happened without immediately needing to explain it.

There is a difference between making meaning from an experience and believing the experience was meant to happen.

There is a difference between learning from something and believing you need the suffering in order to learn.

There is a difference between finding something valuable afterward and deciding the painful thing was somehow valuable because it happened.

We can let those things remain separate.

Sometimes life gives us something beautiful.

Sometimes it gives us something difficult.

Sometimes it gives us something that is simply, spectacularly, profoundly shitty.

We don’t have to make it profound.

We don’t have to make it beautiful.

We don’t have to make it useful.

Sometimes things just suck.

And maybe that’s enough truth for today.