Pause and THINK Before You Speak

The title is as much of a reminder for me as it is for everyone reading this.

Have you ever had a life-changing event/trauma and one of your pinhead friends says "God wouldn't give you this challenge if you couldn't handle it".

This is complete horseshit. I fucking hate it when someone parrots this platitude to someone that's struggling through life.

If you go through a life-changing/traumatic event and have a nervous breakdown, then it's quite obvious you CANNOT handle it and you were given it anyway. And let's not forget all those people that have committed suicide. Evidently, they couldn't handle it either huh?

Here's the awful truth. In this game as a human, there is a such thing as FAILURE. It's part of the learning process and if you haven't come to terms with it, you've got a long way to go. If you can't learn to cope with FAILURE, you will have a very hard time here. I should know. I've lost count of the number of nervous breakdowns and periods of paralysis in the fetal position as an adult I've had in my life. And I'm not bragging about that either. I just have this uncontrollable urge to spew the truth unfiltered. There are many, many things down here that I know I CANNOT handle. I FUCKING LOVE dogs more than people, but there's no way I could work in a veterinarian's office or animal shelter. That would destroy me and I'm not going to delude myself otherwise.

"What doesn't kill me (you) makes me (you) stronger".

This is another horrible platitude that I despise. It's what people like to say to comfort themselves (or others) when they don't know how else to process the overwhelming amount of shit that is being forced down their throat. Here's the reality. If it doesn't kill you, it CAN make you weaker. It can traumatize you to the point of paralysis. It can make you want to curl up in a ball and WISH that it had killed you. Modern society calls it PTSD and if you have ever suffered from it or know of anyone who has, I know you'll recognize the truth in what I'm saying.

So the next time you're going through some serious shit and a friend chimes in with one of the two phrases above a.k.a. their worthless two cents, you can rebut them with what I just told you and wave to them with one finger.

Sometimes when life gets shitty, the BEST thing you can SAY is NOTHING. And the BEST thing you can DO is to HUG them. And if you're a true friend, don't just sit there and watch them cry. Cry WITH them.