"People say 'what ever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger'. Even as people say this they must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn't kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time."
This sounds so harsh and negative, but I think it's pretty spot on. What doesn't kill you does make you weaker, less able to deal with your life in many cases. It can sever connections you had with people as you no longer exist in the form you used to, and it rips your heart out. Your innocence is lost a little more each time life throws you a curve ball.
I read this today too:
"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable."
So maybe suffering alone is what is so crippling, so devastating to us, but the way we react to it, both through our choices, but also through innate emotional processes, can bring us to a place of greater strength.
The last part speaks to me the most: remaining open and vulnerable. Life teaches us to keep our hearts closely guarded because life hurts. Life is often wonderful too, but there is inevitable pain all around us. We get pretty good at walking away from things before they get a chance to hurt us, and we miss alot as a result. It's so easy to become jaded, wearing armor of cynicism. But pain takes away this armor temporarily, and we are stripped naked whether we want to be or not. And it's then that you are completely open to others, even right in the middle of some kind of tragedy. And it's usually then that you are often the recipient of unfathomable kindness. I think kindness, though it doesn't cause us pain, is a force that makes us uncomfortable and puts us on guard, so it's only when we're vulnerable that we fully experience it.
This passage says it all:
“I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid. Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.
I think being forced into vulnerability by your pain, and admitting that you are in fact dependent on connections with other people, their kindness, their knowledge of intimate portions of you, is one of the greatest things suffering does for us. Building on this experience is what adds to our own humanity.
