I would like to quote an excerpt here from Aglaia Dateshidze, which I came across online right while working on this piece....
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"Don't worry, your emotional pain will wait while you try to run away from it.
Yet it has enough patience and love for you to wait until you try every possible way and realize there is nowhere to run. The pain is inside you, and therefore it is not going anywhere. How can you escape what is within? It can stay inside you for this entire life. And perhaps for many lives.
Wherever you go, you carry it within you like a burden, until you understand what a gift it can be. Until you realize that living is painful in general. Often more painful than dying. That to truly feel alive, you must learn to feel and experience pain. To find a time and space for it.
Until you surrender to it and live through it, allowing it to perform a healing transformation within you.
To turn you off, and then turn you back on again. To temper you. To nearly kill you. To force you to accept what is happening. To derail you from familiar tracks and turn you inside out. To bring you to an impasse from which you can only emerge with a different level of consciousness. To make you wiser and older. And, strange as it may seem, happier, but in a completely different way. Adding understanding and value.
To allow you to become fundamentally someone else, someone impossible to describe right now. Someone impossible to even imagine. Someone you cannot possibly dream of, because it is not yet known who that is. One who has shed illusions and grown older. Who has hatched, cracking themselves open like an egg. And who has begun to genuinely appreciate that the leaves are green and the sky is blue. And that the body simply breathes. And that people reach out to one another from the depths of their solitude, despite all barriers."