Woe is me, the martyr

Fact: Everyone has trials. Everyone experiences bumps in their road of life.

If you are lucky, you learn something from your trial that makes you a better human being, better able to empathize with others, better able to handle future problems, stronger.

Question: Why is it then that we all seem to take pride in the trials we’ve gone through and how hard they were for us? Or is that just me?

Why do people think that the only way to learn a particular lesson is to go through their particular trial? That if you didn’t experience what they did then you can’t possibly know what they know? Which is partially true. I will never know exactly what someone else knows. But that would be true even if I experienced the exact same situation they did simply because we are two different people. What is a trial for one person might not be nearly so bad for somebody else.

That means that perhaps I can learn life lessons in another way if I can’t learn them in the same way as others. So when they say they learned all about how life is hard and you just have to keep going because they had babies that kept them up at night and they didn’t get a good night’s sleep for years, maybe they shouldn’t also say that unless you’ve done that you just can’t know about the hardness of life. Because then I wouldn’t give them a dirty look and think about all I’ve learned through my non-baby trials and then take pride in the fact that I’ll probably still get the lack-of-sleep-because-of-a-baby trial someday and that just makes me so much better than them because I’ve had trials they’ll never have but still get to have trials like theirs. Ha!

Wait. That’s just crazy talk. The prideful martyr thing is just crazy. Which is what I realized after I gave them a dirty look and thought about it for a minute.

Yes, I’ve had trials in my life that have taught me a lot about life, about how it isn’t always easy, about how you don’t always get what you want and sometimes you barely get what you need and how sometimes you can feel so utterly alone but if you don’t handle the situation than nobody will. But the way I learned those things is not the only way to gain the strength I have from getting through them.

I need to remember that more and give dirty looks less. Because this prideful martyr thing just won’t work out in the long run.