Your response can become stronger than the circumstances that required it.

Circumstances set the conditions but do not determine what you become inside them. People come out of hard situations having built something that outlasts the situation entirely: a capability, a clarity, a steadiness. The response can end up mattering more than the thing it responded to.

In a difficult stretch, ask not only how to get through it but what you want to be true of you at the end. Let that guide some of your choices. The situation will pass; what you built in it stays.