A full life isn’t one with no pain. It’s one with enough love to carry the pain.

A life with no pain in it is not on offer to anybody, so measuring yours by how little hurts will always read as failure. What actually varies is what sits on the other side of the scale: people who know you, work you care about, places that feel like yours. The pain is not cancelled by any of that. It gets carried.

If something heavy is sitting on you right now, see whether one person knows the whole of it. If nobody does, that is the part worth changing first, and the quietest version is telling one person this week.