The Story of Overcoming and What’s Left Unsaid

As human beings, one of our favorite story archetypes is the journey of the overcomer, which follows an arch of 1) character is faced with adversity, 2) character struggles due to adversity, 3) character reaches rock bottom, 4) character has a turn-around moment, 5) character works through a healing process, 6) character experiences renewed life, and 7) character or narrator concludes with a nod to a happily-ever-after.

And this makes for inspiring and potentially uplifting entertainment. But that’s just it: this narrative is entertainment; it doesn’t accurately depict real life **even if the character is a real person sharing an autobiographical account of their own experience. And this can set us up for failure.

We are exposed to this template so often that it can become easy to internalize this projection as to how our own struggle with adversity should go, and when it doesn’t go as outlined, it can become easy to believe we failed. Why? Because we heard so many people claim this was how they reached success and happiness, that this must be how it’s supposed to happen?!

But they left so much unsaid. (And psst…there’s not a happily-ever-after.)

So when storytellers skip over the hard parts and focus on how great their lives are now, I feel cheated and a bit deceived, which incites a little anger.

While we can overcome specific challenges and recover from the pain that results from those experiences, we have setbacks and unexpected relapses, and even if not, life is continuing. We pick up new fights, new hurts, new losses.

Healing is not a linear experience. It’s more spiral, where we recover a little more with each cycle. “Lessons are repeated until learned.”

And this isn’t punishment. This isn’t even failure. With each round, we learn the lessons at a deeper, more enriching level. Wash. Rinse. (Maybe throw in a blow dry.) Wear. Repeat.

“Wear” is the fun part. We get a little break and a period of enjoyment that can last years or a matter of minutes or any length in between. But “Repeat.”

(This is why marriage can sometimes be harder than we expected. We dated our partner during a “Wear” period, and sometime after marriage, “Repeat” began.)

Life is never going to be easy. We’re never going to achieve a state of perpetual bliss—at least not on this earth.

We can, however, achieve greater health, more frequent moments of happiness, and foster more fulfilling and rewarding experiences. But even life at its best will be a mixed bag. And for me, I’ve experienced some of the best times in my life while simultaneously experiencing the worst. (Dickens may have known something after all.)

We’re never out of the developmental stage here on earth. From conception to death, we change. And change is uncomfortable at its easiest and excruciating at its most difficult. And that change can either make us “bitter or better.” And that is something we control.

We can’t always control our circumstances or the conditions of our lives, but we can change the way we think. We can change our perspectives to shift the direction of our life the way we want to go. The winds change eventually. And sometimes our greatest accomplishment is holding on in the storm. That’s it. We don’t make progress seemingly, and we may even lose ground, but we survive. It takes all our strength, but we hold on and then the wind is in our favor with gust in our sails.