I believe that everything that happens has a reason for happening.
I am at a point in my life where believing that feels hopeful. Not because life is going south, but because it’s comforting to think that even the difficult chapters might have a purpose.
Ever since I was a young teenager, I have constantly heard my mother say,
“Jo hota hai acche ke liye hota hai.”
(Whatever happens, happens for the good.)
Whether I came home with disappointing grades or my heart had just been broken over something that felt like the end of the world, this was the advice she always gave me.
Back then, I hated hearing it. How could bad grades possibly be good for me? How could heartbreak have a reason? None of it made sense.
I cried. I got angry. I blamed the universe for being unfair.
I don’t agree with everything that happens. No, I don’t.
When the grief is fresh, I don’t suddenly become wise. I became angry. I curse the universe. I beg it to change its mind. I bargain. I bribe. I blackmail. I promise I will become a better person if this one thing just goes away.
I talk to the universe… or anyone who might be listening.
Looking back, it sounds a little irrational. But that’s what pain did to me. I wasn’t looking for answers. I was looking for relief.
Pain has a way of blinding you. It makes you react long before you are able to reflect. It doesn’t begin with acceptance. It begins with grief. It begins with anxiety. It begins with asking,
“Why me?”
“Why is this happening to me?”
It’s only much later, when the storm inside me became a little quieter, that another question slowly replaced the first.
“What is this trying to teach me?”
That question didn’t erase the pain. It didn’t magically make everything okay. But it changed the direction I was walking in. Instead of believing life was only happening to me, I slowly began believing it might also be happening for me.
Healing, of course, doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes decades. And sometimes there are parts of us that never heal completely.
One experience doesn’t change you. One conversation doesn’t change you. One heartbreak doesn’t change you. Life doesn’t upgrade you overnight. It simply updates you, little by little. Every experience leaves something behind and takes something away until, one day, you realise you are no longer the same person who walked into it.
That’s why every time life throws me into another difficult chapter, my first reaction is still much the same.
The only difference now is that I find my way back a little sooner.
That question still visits me. It just doesn’t stay as long anymore. Before I know it, another quietly takes its place.
“What is this trying to teach me?”
I know this because a very young version of me smiled through life while feeling completely hollow inside. Looking back, I don’t think those experiences made me stronger. They simply made me different.
One thing those years changed in me was how I looked at other people. I became far less judgmental. I smiled through some of the hardest years of my life, and most people never knew.
That’s when I realised something I have never forgotten.
Appearances are terrible storytellers.
Since then, I have tried to judge people less because I have learned that you never really know what someone else is carrying behind a smile.
The moment I stopped believing everything was happening simply to hurt me and started believing it might be trying to teach me something, my perspective changed completely.
Maybe it had a purpose I simply couldn’t see yet.
Sometimes it even feels like the universe is quietly introducing me to parts of myself I hadn’t met yet.
A little more patient.
A little more compassionate.
A little more hopeful.
For years, my mother believed it for me, until one day I realised I believed it too.
Today, I still don’t have all the answers. I still don’t know why certain things happened the way they did. Maybe I never will.
But I have stopped needing every answer to move forward.
Maybe everything does happen for a reason.
Or maybe believing that has simply helped me carry what life has given me.
This is simply how I have chosen to make sense of my experiences. Yours may lead you somewhere completely different.
I also understand that some grief is so devastating, some trauma so life-altering, that the idea of everything happens for a reason may feel impossible to believe. And that’s okay. We don’t all heal in the same way, and we don’t all find meaning in the same places.
It simply gave me a way to carry it.
And somewhere along the way, without even realising it, I had grown into the very belief I once resisted.
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