Your day starts something like this…

You wake up late, and you don’t seem to have any hot water in your shower. Your makeup isn’t working right; your hair isn’t staying in place. You have only been up for an hour but the universe has decided that they have different plans for you today. You spill your breakfast on the shirt you were planning on wearing, only to change and dribble toothpaste down the second one. Nothing is going right and you haven’t even stepped out the door.

You start the car and realized you have 30 miles to empty, and you’re running late because of the wardrobe malfunctions you have had all morning. It just keeps adding up and finally you just can’t take it anymore.  You end pulled off the side of the road, crying, just imagining how horrible the rest of your day is going to end up.

Well, let me tell you something. I get it.

It seems like just when everything is starting to look up, there always has to be something to go wrong.  Anything from not having any clean clothes to wear, to your little baby starting the day off with a blow out. But if there’s one thing that I have learned in my short 27 years of life, it’s that you have to push through it.

Life isn’t going to be just a bunch of unicorns and rainbows. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be ugly. It’s going to straight-up suck sometimes, maybe even more often than not. You are going to be pushed to your limits and at times even further, until a point that you think you are going to break. But the greatest thing about it is you are going to make it through it. That old saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a pretty accurate statement about life. The trials that we go through, the pain that we feel, make it possible for us to feel real joy and happiness. Just imagine what life would be like if you didn’t truly know what a heartbreak felt like. If you had never had a broken heart, you wouldn’t know what it felt like to truly love.  If you never knew what it was like to be sad, how would you really feel joy. There would be no real way to discern those feelings, and we would just be stuck. Stuck with mediocre.

I don’t want to be stuck.

I have seen the bottomless pit that we seem to dig ourselves into when we think that nothing can be worse than it is, and somehow it ALWAYS manages to get worse. I’ve had to fight to pull myself out of that hole, only to realized that whatever trial I had to go through was only there to make me better, and to build me up so I could be a better me. It helped me be grateful for what I do have, and not take advantage when things are great.

So sure, it may not be easy. There’s going to be times we just want to give up. But push back, and you’ll be grateful you did.