I remember when I first started therapy about four years ago and I was deep in the struggle (click here to read about why I do what I do). I spent the better part of the first year asking the same question over and over again. Why me? Not why me as in why me and not someone else. More along the lines of why me because everyone else seems to be trucking along just fine. Why had I wound up with Cancer? I felt like I was being punished. And yes, looking back on that now, it seems absurd. 

Everyone is struggling. Everyone is going through something and it may not look like it from the outside, but they are. You see, that’s the thing about life, somewhere along the way, we made the mistake of expecting it to be easy. We thought that life was supposed to be happy happy joy joy all the time. But it isn’t and it’s not possible. What I’ve discovered, we all have pain and suffering in our life but it comes wrapped up in different types of packaging. And, when we’re stuck in our stuff, it can be hard to remember that we’re not alone.

 

The struggle is real and if you hang out on the internet, you know everyone’s got an opinion. 

 

The reason I had cancer could have been any number of things: genetics, environmental or behavioural triggers, food intake, year and years of weight manipulation, whatever. If you hang out on the internet, you know everyone’s got their opinion. It was when I started to realize that my battle with cancer was no different than your struggle with depression. And, your fight against depression takes just a big as toll as the person going through a divorce. Their divorce can be just a debilitating as someone juggling three jobs having a hard time making ends meet. We all have battles, conflict, and challenges. Some days are good, and some days you want to jam an ice pick through your eye.

 

you can’t have the good without the bad

 

What I’ve learned, and it’s a basic lesson, you can’t have the good without the bad. They come as a package, and when you can understand that, life starts to unfold in the most interesting way. I don’t mean that every time something wonderful happens that you need to be on the lookout for the other shoe to drop. But what I am saying is, life comes at us in waves. Some waves are big, and some are small. Then every now and again a rogue wave comes outta fu*kin nowhere knocking us to the ground. Its all a part of life and one thing I know for sure is we can’t stop the waves from crashing, but we can help others when they’re being knocked around by life. The struggle is a part of life.