There is healing in the bitter cup.

Not everything unpleasant does you good, and nothing requires you to call your worst season a gift. What is true is narrower: some of the things that help most are unwelcome at the time. Honest feedback, an ending you did not want, a diagnosis that finally names what is happening. These arrive tasting of nothing pleasant, and they still move you somewhere better than pretending would have.

If something bitter is in front of you now, ask whether it is the kind that repairs or the kind that only hurts. Take the first slowly and with company. For the second, there is no obligation to find the lesson.