Looking Back, Would You Change It? Or Did It Change You?
I remember sitting at a retreat last January, staring at my life timeline—the highs, the lows, the moments that shaped me. Some were easy to make peace with. But then I hit that one. The one that stopped me cold. The one that hurt so deeply I couldn’t find a single shred of highest good in it.
I sat there stuck, my eyes burning with frustration, until my coach walked over. I looked up and said, “I can’t find the highest good in this.”
She met my gaze and simply said, “Isn’t that interesting?”
And let me tell you—I boiled inside. The anger, the pain, the injustice of it all came rushing back. You don’t understand, I wanted to shout. You don’t know how hard this was. How much it hurt. How I didn’t deserve it.
But somewhere in the fire of that moment, I realized something: If I hadn’t walked through that pain, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do today.
I wouldn’t have this unshakable passion for helping women step into their voices, own their power, and love themselves fiercely.
That doesn’t mean I love that it happened. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t undo it if I could. But I can recognize the way it shaped me. I can hold gratitude for who I became because of it.
And that’s the thing about the hardest moments in life—we don’t always see their purpose right away. Sometimes, it takes years. And sometimes, it’s not about making peace with the pain itself but with what it grew within us.
I don’t believe in forcing gratitude for things that broke us. But I do believe in staying open to the possibility that one day, we’ll see how even the hardest moments carried something for us.
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