Author: Lauren

First off, I apologize for how stagnant my blog has been recently. My week has been busy and filled with work. What free time I HAVE had, I’ve been using it to hang out with friends and have left my blog in the dust. Also, what writing I have been doing has been for my 80 page book for a class (which I am VERY excited about) . My updates will probably be weekly given the workload that is building up as the semester drags on, so look for them once a week!  Yesterday was one of those days. I went for a run with Kyle and was just having a crummy-feeling morning. It was one of those mornings where my lungs were just FILLED with mucus trying to come out. Running was helping that mucus come up, and that was a good thing…but so much at once was making me sick. Not to mention, all that effort coughing to get it out was tiring me out. So we were running through some paths in the woods across from campus and I just sprinted, hoping the exhaustion would just make me throw up all the gunk that was filling my stomach and my throat. Soon I stared dry heaving mixed with painful, forceful, gagging coughs. Eventually I gave up, my eyes were watering and I was so tired that...

http://www.ted.com/talks/stacey_kramer_the_best_gift_i_ever_survived.html This talk really affected me. I empathized with her story, agreeing that pain and suffering often can have positive results. I expected most people to be inspired by this, and I immediately thought about posting it on my blog. Then I started to scroll down to the comments and was a little surprised. While most people commented that her words should be celebrated, some people were arguing that seeing her cancer as a “gift” was a delusion, that nothing positive can ever come out of a painful experience, in fact that “No one has ever shown that you can learn something positive from pain and suffering and humiliation” Obviously this is a clearly unsupported and overly generalized statement but it almost angered me. I tried to see from their point of view. Maybe these people had never experienced something difficult, maybe they have never seen their life threatened, maybe they have never dealt with something beyond their control, and maybe they didn’t know what it meant to have a positive attitude when things are hard. I realize that if you don’t understand something, it’s often hard to see how someone could POSSIBLY deal with it. How could something so beautiful come out of something so horrible? It’s true, not everyone sees their hardships as blessings or as gifts, some things are so horrible, so life-altering, so painful, that...