Embrace Your Struggles Before They Embrace You

Everybody struggles with something on a daily basis. 

It doesn’t matter who you are, how much you have or have not achieved, or how strong of an individual you may be, you are going to struggle. 

Whether it be with a thought, an emotion, a relationship, or part of your physical being, you struggled with something yesterday, you are going to struggle with something today, and you are going to struggle with something tomorrow and for the rest of the days of your life. 

Struggle is inevitable. It is how we deal with our struggles, though, that ultimately define the person that we are and the person that we will become. 

As with everything in life, you have a choice to make when it comes to how you handle challenges and adversity. You can allow your struggles to consume your every thought and to steal the one life that you get to live. Or, you can embrace your struggles, learn from your many weaknesses, and become a better individual as a result of doing so. 

Just know that your struggles and fears will take away from the quality of your everyday life only if you allow them to. 

We aren’t meant to be the same person that we were yesterday. We are meant to grow, to become stronger, and to achieve more today than we ever have in our past. The only way that this happens is if you learn to embrace your struggles before they embrace you. 

Embrace Your Struggles

When we find ourselves struggling, it’s our natural human instinct to make excuses or to pin the blame on someone/something else. Nobody wants to struggle, and nobody wants to feel like a failure. 

When you take a moment to reflect and think about it, you will probably notice that you spend more time trying to come up with various excuses for why you are struggling, or for why you can’t do something instead of actually working towards overcoming your struggles. 

Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one.

Everybody loves to make excuses. Not just because it’s easier or because it requires less effort, but because making excuses prevents us from ever having to hold ourselves accountable. As long as we can push the blame onto somebody or something else, then we will never have to blame ourselves and confront our own insecurities.

The only problem with this is that the excuses we make only end up holding us back. As long as we are willing to make excuses for why we can’t do something, we are never going to find the success that we envision for ourselves, the skills that we need to overcome any challenge, or the strength needed to overcome our struggles. 

The only way that you are ever going to overcome your struggles is if you learn to embrace your struggles and allow them to help shape you into the person you desire to become. 

Overcoming Your Excuses

After hiding from my struggles for many, many years, I will be the first to admit how challenging it is to break free from the habit of making excuses. But when I reflected back on my life, I was faced with the realization that I wasn’t happy with the person that I was and that my habit of making excuses was only holding me back. 

I have been diagnosed with depression. I have suffered an eating disorder for close to seven years. I have isolated myself to the point where I have broken many close relationships. 

All of these were struggles that I was, and currently am experiencing. While I could choose to pin the blame on those around me and allow these struggles to consume every area of my life, that wouldn’t have benefited me. Instead, I have had to learn how to embrace my struggles, accept them as part of my past, and have started to work towards overcoming them. 

As we all know, the only way to find the light at the end of a dark tunnel is by continuing to move forward, and that’s what I chose to do.

The thing is, embracing your struggles means that you are willing to take responsibility for where you are at in life. No, you may not be to blame for everything and you may not have the power to control the actions of others, but you always have control over how you react to everything that happens to you. With this responsibility comes a sense of control – control of taking back your own life.

If you are finding yourself struggling in life or not living up to the expectations that you have set for yourself, the only way that you are ever going to move forward is if you learn to embrace your struggles and learn from your mistakes.

It was hard to come to terms with my struggles and to take sole responsibility for who I was as a person, but it was the only way that I was going to be able to accept myself as a person and start living the life I desired to live.  

Taking the Next Step in Life

Everybody needs to go through struggles in life. Struggles not only help us to learn from the many mistakes that we make on a daily basis, but they also help to keep us humble and simultaneously help us to realize how good we truly have it in life.

Bottom line, learning to embrace your struggles is the ultimate key to success and happiness as it’s the only way that you are going to be able to learn from your imperfections, let go of the burdens that are holding you back, and to progress into the person that you want to be. 

The next time you start to feel fearful or anxious, don’t shy away or try to hide that feeling. Embrace it! You need to embrace your struggles in order to develop the skills necessary to conquer them. And as you continue to grow, you will have an easier time overcoming the struggles that you face and will develop a sense of self-confidence that no fear will be able to break.

Michael Bonnell