The Pain Is Coming Either Way

So choose: pain with growth or pain with suffering

I say this with love (and I’m talking to both you and me): If your life looks or feels like your past, you are not growing. You are surviving. And that’s fine—for a time. Survival is necessary. It serves a purpose. But eventually, you will be faced with a crossroads: Do you want to feel safe, or do you want to feel alive? Because those are not always the same thing. And if you’re not living a life that regularly challenges your defenses, that calls you to expand, to risk, to stretch—you’re probably not growing. You’re just rehearsing old patterns with new people. Same script, different actors.

The fuckery of it all is that our brains are wired for survival, for moving away from threat—not necessarily for living fully. Trauma intensifies that wiring. It reinforces the belief that safety is paramount, even when safety looks like misery. Your defenses are smart and often, your defenses have defenses—layers of protection designed to keep you from changing, even if the life you’re protecting is one you’ve outgrown.

So we make choices that numb us in the moment but slowly drain us over time. We stay in relationships that wound us. We shrink ourselves to keep the peace. We defer dreams to avoid the sting of failure. We distract. We delay. We deny.