Life did not arrive gently for me.
 It didn’t come with soft instructions or safety rails. It came loud, heavy, and often unforgiving. 
From a young age, I learned that life can be painfully cruel, not in dramatic, cinematic ways, but in quiet moments where your heart breaks and no one notices. 
In the moments where you realise that effort doesn’t always lead to reward, that love doesn’t always stay, and that doing your best doesn’t guarantee being spared from pain.
I’ve learned that life does not owe us fairness. That truth is one of the hardest lessons to accept. 
You can be kind and still be hurt. 
You can be honest and still be misunderstood. 
You can love deeply and still be left behind. 
Pain does not discriminate, it finds its way into everyone’s life eventually, no matter how careful or deserving they are.
For a long time, this made me angry.
 
I questioned why suffering existed at all.
 
Why people had to endure loss, betrayal, loneliness, or grief. Why some wounds linger for years while others seem to walk away untouched.

There were days when the weight of existing felt unbearable, when simply getting through the day felt like a quiet act of survival.
But pain, I’ve learned, is not meaningless.
As much as I hate it, pain teaches us things comfort never could. It strips us down to who we truly are. It forces us to sit with ourselves, to confront our fears, our flaws, and our strength. Pain reveals how deeply we can feel, and that depth, even when it hurts, is something profoundly human.
Without the darkness, we wouldn’t recognise the light.
 
We wouldn’t know peace without chaos.
 
We wouldn’t cherish joy without having tasted sorrow.

We wouldn’t recognise love without having felt its absence.
And yet, when it comes to love, I know I am lucky.
I am deeply, profoundly grateful that I found real, meaningful love early on in my life, the kind of love that feels safe, grounding, and true. The kind that sees you fully and chooses to stay. I never want to take that for granted, because not everyone gets to experience it.
But love is not one thing, and it does not only exist in one place.
Love comes in many shapes and forms, friendships, family, pets, expectations, versions of people we believed in, and even versions of ourselves we had to let go of. 
And even though I may be one of the lucky ones when it comes to romantic love, other forms of love have broken me many, many times. I’ve been hurt by people I trusted, disappointed by love that couldn’t meet me where I was, and wounded by connections I thought would last forever.
Having love does not make you immune to heartbreak.
 And gratitude does not erase grief.
If anything, loving deeply has taught me just how much there is to lose, and how brave it is to keep loving anyway.
The bad moments sharpen our awareness of the good ones. A genuine laugh means more after long silence. A calm day feels sacred after months of inner storms. Love feels deeper when you know what it’s like to lose it. Even hope, fragile, trembling hope, shines brightest when it rises from despair.
Life has taught me that strength is not loud.
 It’s not always confidence or bravery on display. Sometimes strength is waking up when you don’t want to. Sometimes it’s staying soft in a world that keeps giving you reasons to harden. Sometimes it’s choosing to keep feeling, even when feeling hurts. I’ve also learned that healing isn’t straightforward.

You don’t “get over” pain neatly. 
Some days you carry it well, other days it drags behind you like a shadow. And that’s okay. Growth doesn’t mean never hurting again, it means learning how to live with the scars without letting them define you.
Life is cruel.

Life is painful.

And yet, life is also breathtakingly beautiful.
It exists in fleeting moments, a sunset that stops you in your tracks, a song that understands you, a conversation that feels like home, a quiet realisation that you survived something you once thought would destroy you.
I’m still learning.

I’m still hurting.

I’m still growing.
But if there’s one thing life has shown me so far, it’s this, 
The good doesn’t cancel out the bad, it exists because of it.
And even when life feels unbearably heavy, the fact that beauty can still find us is reason enough to keep going.
Because if pain taught me anything, it’s that the good moments, when they come, are worth everything it took to get there.
Until next time,

Ta ta for now,

Yours, Lainey

🦋🦋🦋