I know that might sound like a bumper sticker. This isn't toxic positivity, and it's not about pretending things don't hurt. It's a framework for how I move through the world, and it has changed everything about how I experience what "happens" to me.
When something falls apart, when a door closes, when I find myself somewhere I didn't plan to be, my first question is never why is this happening to me. It's what is this showing me. That single shift in orientation changes the entire relationship you have with your own life.
The job you didn't get. The relationship that ended. The detour you didn't choose. In my experience (and I've had enough floors to speak with some authority here ), nothing that has ever come into my life arrived without reason, and nothing that left has either.
That doesn't mean I always understood it in the moment. It means I've learned to stay curious instead of collapsing into victimhood. It means I trust that the pattern will reveal itself, even when I can't see it yet. Everything that has ever "happened" to me has been preparing me for something. Including the hard things. Especially the hard things.
What's one moment in your life that felt like a mistake at the time — but you now see differently? I'd love to hear it.