What's the Meaning of This? Taking Ownership of Your Story

I am brutal with the unsubscribe button. If you don't add immense value to my inbox, get out!

That said, there are a couple newsletters I read religiously. One of those is Mark Manson's Your Next Breakthrough. Last week's Thanksgiving edition was, unsurprisingly, focused on gratitude... but with a twist. 

He posed two questions: "What struggle are you grateful for? How has it enriched your life?"

And it got me thinking... about struggle, gratitude, meaning-making, and Goldilocks.

The Struggle Is Real 

Life is chock full of struggle. Every single one of us is going to have some. Probably a lot. Maybe even more than our fair share. Our struggles will take different shapes and forms, and they'll differ in terms of intensity and duration. But none of us is getting out of this life unscathed.

What's interesting, though, is that some of our struggle will be self-imposed. 

We may make bad decisions, ones that prioritize present comfort over future happiness. We may let our egos drive the bus, stubbornly clinging to mental rules that don't actually serve us. We may lack the courage to do the hard thing that would actually change our trajectory. And we will struggle as a result.

There is a lot of struggle, though, that is not our fault. Things for which we bear no responsibility happen to us. We didn't cause it or ask for it. 

Yet, we can compound the struggle without even realizing it. 

What we do in the aftermath, both immediately and over time, will have a great impact. Do we surrender our power and agency, giving ourselves over to victimhood or passive resignation? Or do we take charge of our destiny, accepting what we can't change and owning what we can? 

The Importance of Meaning-Making

Our minds are meaning makers. They take our experiences and craft a story about why it happened and what it means about who we are and how the world works. 

Judge me if you want, but the thought that just came to mind was Bob Ross and his "happy little accidents." 

Ross was a painter who had a TV show during my childhood. I remember watching him, with his mild manner, as he taught the audience how to paint landscapes. And when he made a mistake, he just turned it into something beautiful that fit with the rest of the scene. 

Through his art, he modeled adaptive meaning-making. The blotch of paint on the canvas was simply a swatch of color on color. The meaning we assign to it, however - "mistake," "ruined," "bad," "impetus for something new and better" - is up to us. 

It's the same sentiment behind the saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." 

I recognize that truly tragic things happen. Objectively hurtful, harmful, and horrifying. I am not saying to minimize them or pretend that they are anything other than what they really are. What I am saying, though, is that we need to be careful about how we make meaning out of the struggles we encounter. 

We can become defined by those struggles in ways that aren't helpful. We can internalize what our experiences mean about us and the world, and those assumptions and attributions vastly shape our future experiences. 

I know for me, for a long time my vision impairment meant that I was less than, flawed, damaged goods, incapable. It wasn't like I sat down one day and intentionally decided to assign that meaning to my life experience of being legally blind. It just happened. Heck, I didn't even realize that it was meaning-making. I thought it was just reality. 

And I unknowingly compounded my struggle exponentially. 

Now, I still experience some struggle - no amount of meaning-making or good attitude is going to let me read small print or recognize faces when I walk into a room. I still have defective retinas. But I have redefined what my retinas and abilities mean. 

I have taken ownership of what I can control and have written a new story about who I am and what this means for me. 

Where Gratitude Comes In 

I just finished recording the audio version of my book, The Way I See It (squeal! Stay tuned for release details). It was an interesting experience in many ways, and one was noticing how Past Ashley's words landed with my Present Self. There was a particular passage that really struck me:

While life feels light and joyful now, I cannot honestly say that I would choose (legal) blindness. Still, I am grateful for the lessons I have learned and the ways in which my experiences, both professionally and personally, have shaped who I am and the way I approach life.

This isn't fluffy b.s., the psychologist saying the things she's supposed to say. This is real.

Over the course of my journey, I have truly come to appreciate the positive impacts my vision has had on me. So much of my world view and the rules I follow for how to live a good life, both of which I value immensely, stemmed directly from my struggle. I suppose it's possible I could've gotten to the same place mindset-wise without it, but I seriously doubt it. 

Steel is forged in fire. Struggle leads to strength.

And I am grateful for that. 

One of my favorite stories is that of Gerda Weissmann Klein, a holocaust survivor my dear friend and Peak Mind co-founder, Dr. April Seifert, interviewed on her podcast several years ago. Gerda talked about finding opportunities for gratitude during a time of unimaginable atrocities. 

Her story is profound and highlights how we can tap into gratitude during even the darkest of times. 

During times of struggle, harnessing gratitude, whether it's gratitude for the struggle itself or something else occurring alongside it, can help us stay afloat, hold on to our humanity and our heart, and help us stay in the Goldilocks zone.

Finding the Goldilocks Zone

It's easy sometimes to hear messages like this one and to take it as "you shouldn't be affected by the difficult things you go through," and that's not the case. 

As a psychologist, I sometimes see people trying to jump ahead to the silver lining part of a hard experience. They, understandably, want to skip the ick and jump straight to the being ok part. While it's admirable, we can't do that. We can't deny reality (ok, actually we can. People do it all the time. It's just not helpful), and we can't walk away unaffected. The art is to acknowledge what's real, including its impact on us, AND to try to make the best of it. 

We have to find the Goldilocks zone. The just right, walking the tight rope, balanced, middle ground.

We don't want to embrace blind optimism, which looks like standing on the bow of the Titanic as it sinks, refusing to accept what's happening. But we also don't want to go too far the other way by accepting, "This happened to me, and there's nothing I can do about it," resigning ourselves to misery, giving up our agency, or relinquishing our responsibility and inadvertently piling on more struggle. 

We want to accept the parts of our struggle that we can't change and take responsibility for the parts we can, which, at a minimum, is meaning-making and exercising gratitude. 

I'll end by posing the same questions to you that sparked this whole thing. What struggle are you grateful for? How has it enhanced your life?

"Be grateful for your struggles, because within them is the opportunity for growth and meaning."  - Mark Manson