Life After Survival Mode: Not Everything Has to Make You Stronger

For a long time, I was really good at finding the lesson in everything. If I went through a hard season, I looked for the growth. If I was disappointed, I searched for the redirection. If something didn't work out the way I wanted it to, I tried to figure out what it was supposed to teach me.

After everything I've lived through, I understand why. When life changes dramatically, finding meaning can help us make sense of what happened. It can remind us that something good can still grow from circumstances we never would have chosen. I've found plenty of meaning in my hardest chapters, and I'm grateful for the wisdom, perspective and strength I've gained along the way.

Lately, though, I've found myself getting a little exasperated by the idea that everything has to be a lesson.

I realized I was overthinking things and taking life way too seriously. To be fair, that's a tendency I've had for as long as I can remember. I like to understand things. I want to know what they mean, what I'm supposed to learn and how I'm supposed to use that lesson going forward.

At some point, I started wondering if I was so busy looking for the lesson that I was missing the experience itself.

Life After Survival Mode Can Be About Joy

Think about the beauty God created in this world. Butterflies don't need to teach me anything. Neither does a spectacular sunset. Flowers can simply be beautiful. The ocean can take my breath away. Laughter can make my stomach hurt. A great conversation can leave me smiling hours later.

Maybe some things aren't here to make us wiser or stronger.

Maybe some things are simply meant to be enjoyed.

That thought has been challenging me lately because I've spent years working toward big milestones. I've had to learn how to walk with a prosthetic, become more independent, rebuild my strength and return to parts of life I once wondered if I'd experience again. Those milestones matter deeply to me, and they always will.

But I don't want to spend the rest of my life measuring every experience by how much it helped me grow.

I want to laugh with people I love. I want to put on an outfit that makes me feel good, drink yummy coffee, travel somewhere new, try something I'm not particularly good at and make memories that have absolutely no inspirational lesson attached to them.

Maybe that's part of the comeback, too.

You Don't Have to Turn Everything Into a Life Lesson

We love a good transformation story. We want the hard thing to have a purpose. We want the struggle to make us wiser. We want to look back and understand exactly why something happened.

Sometimes we can. I've experienced enough in my own life to know that beauty can grow out of incredibly difficult circumstances.

I also don't think we have to assign meaning to every painful experience in order to move forward from it. We can acknowledge that something was hard, painful, disappointing or unfair without immediately searching for the gift hidden inside it.

And on the other side of those experiences, we don't have to keep looking for opportunities to prove how strong we've become.

Strength has its place. So does joy.

Maybe we don't talk about that part enough.

What Is All That Strength For?

I've talked a lot about making a comeback. These days, I'm thinking more about what we're coming back to.

For me, a comeback isn't complete because I checked off another goal or proved I could do something hard. I've done hard things. I know I can do hard things.

What is all that strength for? Living.

Maybe one of the greatest signs of life after survival mode is that we start looking forward to life again. We become curious. We look forward to something. We do something because it sounds fun instead of because it's productive. We stop measuring our lives only by progress and start paying attention to how much of them we're actually enjoying.

That's the life I want.

I want big dreams and meaningful work. I want to keep growing, learning and becoming the woman God created me to be. And I also want cute shoes, good food, ridiculous laughter, new places, ordinary Tuesdays and stories that begin with, "This sounded fun, so I did it."

I don't think those things are frivolous anymore.

I think they're part of living.

Go Make the Memory

If you've been through a hard season, you may have gotten very good at being strong. You know how to push through, adapt and keep going when life doesn't look anything like you thought it would. Those are incredible things to know about yourself.

Strength was never supposed to become another burden to carry.

You don't have to prove your resilience every day. You don't have to turn every disappointment into wisdom or every experience into personal growth. And you certainly don't need another hard thing to prove who you are.

Maybe today can just be good.

You don't have to explain why you enjoyed it, what you learned from it, or how it changed you. You can receive joy as one of God's good gifts and let that be enough. I'm learning that appreciating my life doesn't always require understanding it. Sometimes it simply requires being present for it.

After everything we've survived, overcome, learned and rebuilt, maybe the question isn't always, What is this teaching me?

Maybe the better question is:

Am I enjoying the life I've worked so hard to live?

You've done enough character building.

Go make the memory.