CATEGORY: Little Pieces Of Life

“This too shall pass.”

I would say these words to myself whenever life brought me face to face with something I was struggling to bear. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes only in my thoughts. Not because I was certain that everything would turn out all right — there were many times when I wasn’t certain of anything at all. I said them because, in those moments, I needed to hear that whatever I was going through would not last forever.

And since there wasn’t always someone there to tell me, I learned to tell myself.

“This too shall pass.”

Looking back now, I realize how much tenderness those four words held. It was as though I were taking myself by the hand and saying, “Hold on a little longer. I’m here.” I wasn’t asking myself to stop being afraid, to stop hurting, or to somehow find my strength right away. I allowed myself to be exactly as I was in that moment — afraid, angry, tired, sometimes lost. And I made myself only one promise: that what I was living through would not always feel this intense, and that I would stay by my own side until it passed.

And it did pass.

But never quietly.

“This too shall pass” never meant “it will be as though it never happened.” I knew something would always be left behind. Losses, marks, scars both small and deep. Some remained tender for a long time; others slowly healed and became simply another part of my story. Still, that little phrase was my way of reminding myself that, however difficult what I was going through might be, one day its intensity would begin to fade.

Then came a moment, months after a particularly painful period in my life, when I stopped to look at what remained. It was one of those private reckonings I have with myself, without pen or paper. I looked at what I had lost, at what had changed, at what would never quite return to the place it once held.

And then I began to look at myself.

I had not come through unscathed. That much was clear. There were still things I couldn’t remember without feeling shaken, and others I knew would need time before they stopped weighing on me.

But something had changed.

My life no longer revolved around what had happened. There were days when I did not think about it at all. I could laugh without feeling as though my laughter were borrowed. I made plans. I had desires again. Almost without realizing it, I was beginning to return to myself.

At first, I noticed small things: the way I responded to situations that would once have unsettled me, how much easier it had become to step away from something that was not good for me, how much less I needed to explain, justify, or make sense of everything. Sometimes I would catch myself responding differently and feel almost surprised.

“Oh, this is new,” I would think.

And it was.

I had never made a conscious decision to change. I had not sat down one morning and decided who I wanted to become after everything I had been through. The changes had come quietly, during the months when I was simply trying to find my rhythm again.

Some of them I liked. Some I needed time to understand better. And some made me smile at the irony of it all. Because there was, indeed, something deeply ironic about the fact that an experience I would never have chosen for myself had left behind a version of me that, in certain ways, I liked more.

Of course, I would never go so far as to thank the pain. I owe it nothing. And yet I could not deny what I saw in the mirror. The victory was there — in my eyes, in my smile, in the way I was able to look at myself again. I had returned. Not unchanged; I was still carrying what that period had left behind. But I had returned stronger, with a strength that, this time, I knew was my own.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a little longer. I smiled at my reflection and, moved by what I saw, said:

“I’m glad I was born strong.”

That day, without realizing it yet, I had found the phrase that would become my own.

Not in the midst of the turmoil, but afterwards, when everything had grown quiet enough for me to see the woman who had emerged from it.

I was not looking at someone else. I was still myself. Only certain things within me had shifted.

I had begun to listen to myself more closely. I no longer dismissed that first, almost imperceptible feeling that told me, “Something about this doesn’t feel right.” Not because I had become suspicious of people or of life — that would have been another kind of prison — but because I had learned to trust myself more.

I also felt less compelled to hold on to something at any cost. If a person or a situation was leaving my life, I no longer felt the same need to keep what no longer wished to remain. I let it go and, in doing so, released myself as well. Some things simply come to an end. And although that thought had once frightened me, I could now find a strange kind of peace in accepting it.

I also noticed that I had begun to forgive differently. Not more, not less. Simply differently. I could understand without necessarily excusing. I could leave something behind without having to diminish what it had been. I could accept that someone had hurt me without needing either to hate them or to erase what had happened.

Most of all, however, I had begun to trust myself a little more.

Not with the kind of unwavering confidence that never questions itself. I still made mistakes. I still felt afraid, reconsidered decisions more than once, and wondered whether I had understood a person or a situation correctly. But even if I was wrong, even if one of my choices ended up hurting me, I knew that I would not abandon myself again.

Perhaps that was the greatest change of all.

And so, even today, when something beautiful happens, or when something comes to an end and leaves behind its own small or greater disturbance, I sometimes find myself smiling.

“This too shall pass” is still there.

Only now, I also know what comes after.

“I’m glad I was born strong.”