There is a concept in psychology called post-traumatic growth — the idea that people who experience significant hardship often report not just recovering, but growing beyond where they were before. More resilient. More empathetic. Clearer about what matters. More willing to take risks because they’ve already survived the thing they were most afraid of.

The research on this is substantial and it keeps pointing to the same thing: the people who experience the most growth after adversity are not the ones who suffered the least. They’re the ones who found meaning in what they went through. Who asked not just “why did this happen to me” but “what did this make possible?”