Life

Life lessons I have learned over the last three years

A few life lessons I have learned over the past three years. 

TL;DR

1. Life will fuck you

2. Life doesn’t owe you shit

3. You have to fight back

4. You have to have a thing

Life will fuck you 

There is this saying “Fall down seven times, get up eight”. It’s a phrase people say when bad stuff happens in your life, but in my opinion, it makes the whole process seem too easy. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to get up. Life doesn’t always give you a chance to breathe, collect yourself, and then try again. Sometimes life will continually beat you to a pulp even whilst you are on the ground. It can be merciless and sadistic. But it is nothing personal and it is certainly no reason to want to “give up”. 

Life doesn’t owe you shit

After experiencing a string of illnesses, I kept on thinking “Surely I will get a break now. I have been through enough.” In hindsight, this was a silly way of thinking. Life is not a thing with feelings. It doesn’t have empathy or a conscience. It does what it does regardless of what you’ve been through, how you’re feeling, or how much more you think you can take. That is to say, it doesn’t owe me (or you) shit.

It’s only recently that I really internalized this message. It took me getting my transplant and experiencing yet another series of unfortunate illnesses to realize that life wasn’t going to “give” me the break I thought I deserved. It is not enough to simply endure hard times, you have to fight back.

You have to fight life back

Which brings me to my next point. At the end of the day, life will win. I will die in the end. But not every fight is about winning. Sometimes it’s about leaving your mark. 

In my case, it’s about doing what I set out to do, regardless of my health. It’s making progress on my work (and succeeding at it) no matter the situation I find myself in, at home or hospital bed. 

Early on when I first got sick I decided not to work. I thought it best to wait until I had “recovered”. After all, it didn’t make sense to start plans that were going to be interrupted by inevitable surgeries and treatments. I quickly realized that this type of thinking would get me nowhere for a few reasons:

1. Things could get worse (and they did)

2. Opportunities don’t wait around or care about what you are going through

3. I didn’t know how long I would be waiting

So I learned to work in less-than-ideal situations. That meant learning how to work when I was doing dialysis, vomiting 20 times a day, or in hospital. It sucked but I was right in the end. What I thought would be 2 - 4 months of illness turned out to be 3 years. I can only imagine how I would have felt if I had put my life on hold for 3 years.

That is to say, all the good things that happened to me during that period came from me actively fighting back. If I had simply endured and “survived” my situation, I would be welcomed to a whole bunch of nothing. 

I’m careful not to have this post come across as advice or inspirational content, as that is not my goal here, what I will say however, is that the key to fighting back is being adaptable and having agency. Don’t wait for certain environments or opportunities to execute your plans. Work with what you have now and where you are now. You always have all that you need to make progress.

You have to have a thing

Fighting back is not enough sometimes. Like I said, life will fuck you in ways you could not have imagined. And sometimes it’s hard to keep swinging. That’s where having a “thing” is important.

At my lowest points, I absolutely thought of giving up e.g. stopping treatment. Each time I have, I found it impossible though, because to do so would put my “thing” in jeopardy, which I just couldn’t do. My “thing” required me to be here, and therefore I had to keep going. To put it crudely, I valued the thing more than myself.

In my case, my thing is my work, but it can be anything. Having kids, a partner, family, gaming, etc. But it has to be something so strong that at your lowest point, you value more than yourself. I have found it is the only way to keep going.

If you don’t have a thing it is really hard to fight back or even endure. I have seen this in my sick friends, and there is no amount of words or encouragement that you can give them to want to continue on in life.

All this is to say, it’s worth finding your thing sooner rather than later. Life can get dark, and it may just be the thing that saves you.