Living with an incurable illness has taught me that not everything is meant to have a solution. From early childhood and on, we are tested and graded upon our ability to know the answer to the problems put before us. However, life is not a multiple choice test nor is it an equation for which you can arrive to a definitive answer. Life is not meant to be solved for, it is meant to be lived. Sometimes, we may need to jot down a quick N/A, "not applicable" or "no answer" and move on as best we can without feeling like we have failed to complete an assignment.
A lot of the time, the “solution” is what we are going to experience and gain from the discomfort we face in circumstances that stretch us beyond what feels like known territory to us. A common theme I have seen in my life is that so many answers have come long before the question has arisen and it has been up to me to interpret meaning from what I have lived through, and take the initiative to apply it retroactively. What was yesterday's N/A could be next week's epiphany. Trusting that everything we struggle through can be repurposed at some point even if it is years down the line is something that allows me to have hope that even when there is no way to solve a problem, there is a way to use the lessons we can learn from it.
I think we owe it to ourselves to make it make sense to us. We aren’t solving for anything, only understanding and accepting the things that have happened to us in a way that feels useful and encourages us to stay flexible going forward. I think back to some of the hardest times in my life when I was faced with things that I thought I needed to fix in order to be able to move on from them. I realize now that I could have saved myself so much grief by understanding that there was no one handing out gold stars at the end of the tunnel if you had all the answers to your problems. The truth is that one day, we just emerge from that tunnel, leaving behind all the things that are too heavy to bring with us, while taking as many tools as we can carry.
I didn’t know in that doctor’s office while hearing my diagnosis, my answer to understanding myself more fully than I ever had, wouldn’t be an answer at all. It would ironically turn out to be an incurable disease … a thing for which the world has said exists in this moment without a “solution.” Sometimes, the most profoundly beneficial things that happen to us are disguised as problems. Being able to realize that we don’t always have to have the answers is what turns those problems into a life rich with appreciation for what is, and not what should be.
I have become more thankful for the things that I cannot solve because they have allowed me to focus on myself instead. I am able to search for meaning in the hardest times of my life instead of answers. I feel so much more invincible approaching my life with the attitude that I can make it through anything rather than thinking I have to know everything. Learning as I go, adapting, changing course even if that means starting over, are all things that feel so much easier to do when we aren’t afraid to get it wrong.
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