you don’t have to be grateful for what broke you

on honoring the parts of you that hurt without asking them to heal into something useful

Hi everyone :) Just a little note before I dive in: the following thoughts are not meant to discourage or reinvent anyone's chosen healing and recovery process. It is simply my way of reminding you that it's not illegal to sit in your pain and feel. There is no good reason to rush your own self-growth. Hold yourself carefully, with feeling.

xo, Jia | Joy in Abundance

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TW: This post discusses the author’s experience with SA. If this is a sensitive topic for you, feel free to skip this read or come back to it when you're ready.

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Experiencing problems is inevitable in life. Some will be as minuscule as losing your keys when you're already late. Others, god forbid, as life-altering as the death of someone you love.

As we grow older, facing more responsibilities and understanding that life demands more from us than ever before, we start choosing efficiency over emotion. We swallow what hurts because there's too much to do, because there's no time to unravel when there are deadlines, dishes, and rent to pay.

This can look like:

"I don't have time to sit here and process my husband’s infidelity. I have to cook for my children."

"I can't quit this toxic job even though it's destroying my mental health…my parents are counting on me to help pay the bills."

So we tell ourselves, "I can get over it. I can forget. I can focus on the bigger picture."

And sometimes that works. But sometimes—quietly, later—it doesn't.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, those problems start to ache again. And in that darkness, you might try to bargain with it:

What is this teaching me? What is this making me into? How can I use this?

Because we've been conditioned to believe that if pain doesn't become purpose, it's wasted. That suffering without a silver lining is somehow selfish or unproductive. We have all subconsciously internalized this idea that every trauma we take on must transform us into better people, that our breakdowns must lead to breakthroughs.

But what happens when there’s no silver lining? What happens when the only truth you find is that something terrible happened and it changed you in ways that don't feel like growth?

This pressure to find meaning in our pain can often become another form of violence—one we inflict on ourselves. Truly, sometimes the best thing you can do is refuse to make your suffering useful.

We are so used to extracting meaning from our suffering that we forget that some things are allowed to just hurt.

The first time I was sexually assaulted, I was 10 years old.

At 10, your life is supposed to feel easy. It is supposed to feel safe. You should be worried about whether you studied well enough for the spelling test or remembered to bring your water bottle to school, not about being taken advantage of.

I didn't know how to deal with it. I didn't even have the words to describe what happened. All I had was a sick feeling in my stomach and an overwhelming sense that something had been taken from me. Something that I couldn't quite name, but could feel in every inch of my body. I felt it in the way I suddenly couldn't concentrate in class, in how I started sleeping curled up in the smallest ball possible, in the way I flinched when others reached toward me too quickly.

I told no one. I didn't know how. I didn't think I was allowed to. When you're that young, you don't know how to tell someone: "This thing happened, and I'm broken now." You don't have the vocabulary for devastation. You don’t understand the severity of trauma. You just know that the world suddenly feels different—sharper, less safe, like walking on glass in bare feet.

So I made an effort to ignore it. Tried to shove it down so deep it might fossilize there and never resurface. I went to school and sat in the same plastic chair, staring at the same whiteboard, but nothing felt the same. I dissociated during the lessons. I played outside with my friends, laughing at their jokes while feeling like I was watching everything through thick glass—present but untouchable, there but not really there.

I thought if I performed normalcy hard enough, if I could just be the same kid I was before, then maybe what happened would reverse itself. Maybe I could undo it through the sheer force of pretending.

But it didn't work. It never works.

Every time I saw his face, I was reminded of the pain and the helplessness. It was sickening. It was like I had the memory set on loop and there was no way to delete it from my brain. Worse, I was burdened with this misplaced shame that arose for letting something like that happen to me. For letting someone else make me feel this way.

All I knew was I wanted that feeling to stop eating me alive.

So, I tried to turn it into something useful—into art, into growth, into resilience. I shared carefully edited pieces of it with friends, watching their faces for the right amount of sympathy without too much pity. I painted abstract representations in art class, smearing dark colors across the canvas and telling myself I was transforming the ugliness into beauty. I let people call me brave when I finally spoke about it years later, and I tried so hard to believe them. I performed strength I didn't feel. I thought that if I could frame it as transformation, as some kind of fucked-up gift that made me more empathetic or resilient or wise, then it would stop feeling like pure violation.

But underneath all that carefully constructed meaning, I was still bleeding. The performance of healing—the forced gratitude, the premature forgiveness, the desperate search for silver linings—only turned the pain inward. Not smaller, not gone.

I felt like I was betraying the 10-year-old me who deserved to be angry, who deserved to grieve what was stolen from her without having to immediately package it into something palatable for other people's comfort.

I felt a little twinge in my throat every time I said I was "grateful for the experience" or that it "made me who I am today." Because I might have said it so many times I started believing it, but I knew deep down I would trade every ounce of supposed wisdom it gave me to feel safe in my own skin again. To have gone my childhood not having to worry about adult matters.

No one told me that healing doesn't have to look like productivity. That sometimes the most honest thing you can do is not make it poetic, not rush to find the lesson or the blessing or the reason it all happened for a purpose.

Sometimes the only truth is: this was awful, and it didn't need to happen, and I didn't deserve it, and it changed me in ways I'm still discovering.

It took me a long time to understand: what happened to me didn't need to be transformed in order to matter. The little girl who was hurt deserved acknowledgment, not optimization. The pain didn't need to be productive to be real. It didn't need to teach me anything to be valid.

Some things are just damage. And that's allowed.

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This is what I want you to know:

Your pain doesn't owe anyone a performance. It doesn't need to inspire others or teach you lessons or make you stronger. It doesn't need to be channeled into art or activism or awareness campaigns. It doesn't need to serve a higher purpose or fit into a neat narrative arc that ends with you being grateful for the experience.

Your pain is allowed to exist for no reason other than it hurts.

Some things are not metaphors—they're just wounds. And they deserve to be honored as such, in all their messy, uncomfortable, unproductive reality. They deserve to take up space in your chest without justification. They deserve your attention without having to earn it through utility. You are not a factory for turning trauma into triumph. You are a human being who has been hurt, and that hurt matters simply because it happened to you.

You do not owe anyone a lesson. Not even yourself. The pressure to find meaning in our pain often comes from a place of discomfort—ours and others'. We want to believe that bad things happen for a reason because arbitrary, undeserved suffering feels too terrifying to accept. We want to think that if we can just learn the right lesson, process it correctly, grow from it appropriately, then we can prevent it from happening again.

But sometimes there is no lesson. Sometimes terrible things happen to good people for no reason at all. Sometimes the only meaning is that it hurt and it mattered because it happened to you. And that has to be enough.

Sometimes it’s best to simply be a witness to your pain. When you allow yourself to just feel without trying to fix, when you sit with your pain without demanding it transform into something useful, you're helping yourself in ways you can’t comprehend. You're saying that your experience matters regardless of what it produces. You're honoring the part of you that was hurt without requiring that hurt to justify its existence.

This doesn't mean you'll never grow from your experiences. It doesn't mean meaning won't emerge naturally over time. But it means you're not forcing yourself to find the silver lining before you've even processed the pain you expect it to come from. It means you're giving yourself permission to be broken without immediately reaching for glue.

You are not a failure for not finding the bright side. You are not broken for feeling lost in the middle. You are not weak for letting something simply be painful without trying to alchemy it into gold.

Pain is not a problem to solve. Read that again.
Pain is not a puzzle to figure out or a code to crack. It is an experience to move through, to sit with, to acknowledge.

You do not have to turn your pain into something.

Because it already turned you into someone.
Not necessarily someone stronger or wiser or more grateful—maybe just someone who knows what it feels like to hurt. Someone who understands that the world can be cruel and bodies can be violated and trust can be shattered. Someone who has felt the particular weight of carrying something you never asked to hold.

And that someone—tender and raw and still healing—is worthy of love and gentleness and the permission to feel without purpose.

Your pain doesn't need to make sense of itself. It doesn't need to earn its place in your story. It doesn't need to become anything other than what it is: proof that you are human, that you feel deeply, that your life has been touched by forces beyond your control.

Let it be what it is. Let yourself be who you are in response to it.
Let that be enough.

Because you—exactly as you are, wounds and all—are already enough.