There’s a creator I love, Charlie’s Toolbox, who said something that made me rethink how I see my own life: Suffering is not proof of effort, and brutality is not a strategy.
You can get the biggest things you want in this life without resistance
I sat with that for a while because it goes against what I was taught to believe about achievement. Grind, bleed, sacrifice sleep, sacrifice health, sacrifice ease, and maybe then you’ll have earned the outcome.
I built a lot of my twenties around that formula, and I believe many others do too. Looking back, it’s almost embarrassing how true the opposite turned out to be.
suffering =/= effort
The things and people I bled for, lost sleep over, ran myself into the ground trying to force, mostly did not work out. I questioned the ones that showed up with ease, because it felt too easy to be real.
My belief was that if good things can arrive without suffering, then all that suffering was for naught. I used to feel a sense of guilt in receiving something I didn’t bleed for, like you skipped a line everyone else is standing in.
I was wrong - the things and people who showed up effortlessly ended up becoming some of the most beautiful, life-altering chapters I’ve had.
Resistance and suffering are not the same thing.
This isn’t an argument for doing nothing and waiting for good things to fall in your lap.
Growth still takes time and effort, often in seasons where nobody’s watching and nothing looks like progress yet.
But there’s a difference between the discipline of showing up in a hard season, and believing that you have to suffer in order to deserve the outcome.
One is about time and unglamorous effort. The other is a story about worthiness. I confused the two for a long time.
I think the suffering-as-proof story comes from the same place. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us absorbed the idea that ease is suspicious, and anything that comes easily must not be real or not well deserved.
It’s just not true.
You do not need to suffer your way into deserving a beautiful life