We absorb a lot of messages about what success is supposed to look like — the career, the relationship, the version of ourselves we were sure we'd be by now. And when life doesn't follow that script, it's easy to conclude that we've failed somehow.

But what if the script was never quite right to begin with?

Growth rarely arrives on our own terms. It tends to find us in the middle of something hard — a loss, a transition, a relationship that's asking more of us than we feel we have to give. We don't choose the circumstances that stretch us. But we do get to choose what we do with them.