My patients always say that they are getting so much from me; however, little do they realize is how much I am getting from them. As I was sitting with a lovely lady who has experienced more hardship in these past few months than most people do in their entire life she told me something that I believe will stay with me forever.
“The bad things that happen to you don’t have to make you a bad person.” She had just finished going into detail about many of the painful things that she had experienced. Even with all of the hardship she has been through, this is how she chose to feel, and how she chose to live her life.
I think it’s so easy to get caught up in our hurt, grief and pain and let it consume us. It is so hard to remain happy and positive when we feel as if we have just been through one bad thing after another and we just can’t catch a break.
With every person that hurts us, comes more pain and lack of trust. With every person that dies, comes more anger and sadness. It is so difficult to not let these things make us angry and bitter.
However, pain and sadness doesn’t need to be taken out on others. The pain we have been through doesn’t have to cause us to treat people badly.
Maybe, just maybe, this pain could make us better. It could give us purpose. It could give us reason to appreciate life and live it to the fullest. It could allow us to love the people in our life even harder for the time that we still get to spend with them.
The reality is, this pain will always be a part of us. It has changed who we are and the way we live our life. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.
So maybe the bad things that happen to us don’t have to make us a bad person. Maybe instead, the bad things that happen to us could make us an even better person than we were before.
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