Sometimes, You Just Have to Say Thank You
It's funny, the moments that caused us the most pain also gave us significant growth. How ironic.
“I didn't know my own strength. And I crashed down, and I tumbled, but I did not crumble. I got through all the pain. I didn't know my own strength. Survived my darkest hour. My faith kept me alive. I picked myself back up. Hold my head up high. I was not built to break. I didn't know my own strength.” - Whitney Houston, I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.
Thank you for the things that didn’t make sense.
Thank you for the closed doors.
Thank you for the heartbreaks.
Thank you for the missed opportunities.
Thank you for the people who brought pain into my life.
Thank you for the seasons when I lacked wisdom and patience.
Sometimes, it really is that simple, just say thank you.
It’s often the darkest moments and the memories we try to push to the far corners of our minds, that lead to the most growth. To the people who played a role in shaping those painful moments, I say thank you. Without them, I wouldn’t have learned the lessons I was meant to. I wouldn’t have recognized the gaps in my development, the places I needed to heal or mature.
Of course, I wish growth always came in happier seasons. And it does, we grow through joy, peace, and love too. But the imprint of trauma is different.
It turns out that our brains are wired to pay more attention to negative or threatening experiences, a concept known as negativity bias. From an evolutionary standpoint, it helped our ancestors survive. The brain perceives painful or emotionally intense events as more important and stores them vividly in long-term memory. The amygdala, a region responsible for processing emotions like fear and anger, tags these experiences as critical. It then signals the hippocampus, which encodes memories, to give them priority. This is why we often remember painful or challenging experiences more clearly than joyful ones.
We reflect on pain not because we're stuck in it, but because our brain has given it a spotlight.
For me, growing in a season of peace has to be intentional. Recently, I noticed God closing doors, one after the other. At first, it was frustrating. I thought I was ready to move into a new season. But God didn’t agree with my self-assessment. There was still more work to be done; more things to heal, understand, and reconcile.
What I’ve realized is that the growth I’ve experienced in this stillness has been profound. Stillness is uncomfortable for me. I associate growth with movement: progress, productivity, or proof that I’m evolving into the version of myself I’ve always wanted to be. It's like I’m trying to show my younger self that I can become everything I once doubted.
But stillness teaches a different kind of growth.
Stillness makes me reflect.
Stillness forces me to sit with discomfort.
Stillness asks me to separate who I am from what I do.
Stillness pulls me into the present, where life actually happens.
Neurologically speaking, this type of deep reflection activates the brain’s default mode network (DMN); the network involved in introspection, self-awareness, and meaning-making. In stillness, without distraction, the brain has the space to process unresolved emotions and integrate experiences into our identity. This is where a lot of my transform has transpired in the past 6 months.
It’s so much easier to learn from the past or live in dreams of the future. The present is harder. It's raw. It's real. Sometimes it’s even sad. But that’s also where the change happens, when we let ourselves be with what’s true now.
And so I’ve learned to say thank you … not just for the healing, but also for the breaking. Breaking is a form of healing, breaking is an invitation, an invitation to rebuild with wisdom and compassion.
Thank you to the pain, the pause, the people, the process.
Thank you, even when it hurts.