Pressure tests aren’t fair. Life gives them to people at random. What’s fair is how you treat yourself after.

Hard things are not distributed by merit. Nobody earns the difficult year, and the person it lands on is not being tested for having deserved it. Which means the usual question, what did I do to end up here, often has no answer worth hunting for. The part that is genuinely yours is what happens next, including how harshly you speak to yourself about it.

If something unfair has landed on you, notice how you would talk to a friend in the same position. Use that tone on yourself for a week. Nothing about the situation requires you to add blame to it.