Don't Give Up.
Everyone faces their share of hardships. Life is all but guaranteed to throw challenges, failures, and tragedies your way, and everyone "loses" in life at some point.
If you're struggling right now, remember that you are not alone. Many others are experiencing or have already faced similar hardships and emerged stronger.
I recently came across an inspiring excerpt from Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday about facing hardships. It was so beautifully written that I felt compelled to share it verbatim:
Endure The Unendurable
Life is not fair. It is not kind. It demands from us not just a strength of body and mind but also of soul.
Seneca was exiled for eight years. Florence Nightingale spent sixteen years in waiting, thwarted from her call. James Stockdale must have yearned for death countless times as he hung there, his arms bound behind his back, a rope lifting him from the floor, popping his shoulders out of their sockets.
Think of the Queen pushing through her annus horribilis. Anne Frank in her attic for twenty-five months, cheerfully writing in her journal. Stephen Hawking, forty years in a wheelchair from ALS. Marcus Aurelius, plagued by a lifelong stomach ailment, then wars and floods and an actual plague, reminding himself that nothing was unendurable.
Think of the mothers who pushed through postpartum. Think of the people who fought through cancer, through bankruptcy, through humiliating failure. Think of the addicts who battled withdrawals to bounce back from rock bottom. Think of the people who clawed their way out of generational poverty. Think of the slaves who survived the worst of what humans can do to one another.
They kept going. They didn’t quit. Still, as Maya Angelou wrote, still they rose. And in so doing, they ennobled and dignified their struggle with endurance and quiet fortitude.
They proved themselves greater than the adversity that befell them. They kept going.
So can you.
Don’t despair. Don’t give up.
Because one day, you will look back from the other side of this struggle… and be glad you did.
Ryan Holiday
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