There is a specific kind of silence that lingers at two o’clock in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep, but your mind is racing. It’s the kind of silence where the weight of being a teenager; the expectations, the relationships, the family pressures, and the overwhelming uncertainty of tomorrow, feel heavy enough to crush you. I’d love to say I have it all figured out, that it all gets better, that I’m standing on the other side of the mountain looking back. But I’m not. I am still very much in the middle of the climb, still tripping, and still navigating the messiness of it all.

For the longest time, when things went wrong, my immediate reaction was a sharp, burning anger at God. If He loved me, why was my life a rocky, uphill battle instead of a smooth road? But lately, amongst the tears on my bedroom floor, I have finally realized something: pain is inevitable, I cannot stop it, but I can choose how I face it. We cannot always choose our circumstances, but we can choose our perspective. We can choose to let hard times break us or build us.

I am actively trying to choose not to be mad at God anymore. Instead, I am clinging to a promise that feels incredibly hard to accept when you’re hurting, but one I know is true. suffering produces endurance.

To choose endurance, I’ve had to untangle a major misconception that I have held for years. ‘If God was really all loving, why does he make bad things happen?’ I have had to realise that we live in a world that can be incredibly dark and heartless, but that doesn’t mean God is the perpetrator of that darkness. God isn’t the one inflicting the pain; He is the one weeping with us in the middle of it.

Psalm 34:18 states “The Lord is close to the broken hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” This verse explains that when you are experiencing deep emotional pain, grief, or spiritual defeat, God is not distant, but right beside you.

There are days when the endurance feels too heavy to carry. I look at my life and think about how much easier things would be if I didn’t have to battle with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. It would be so much easier to wake up without a war going on inside my own mind, to not have to fight just to feel okay, but I have slowly realised, easy isn’t where we grow. Easy doesn’t build character. Easy doesn’t make us resilient, and it certainly doesn’t make us capable of profound grace.

As I sit here navigating these battles, I am starting to see a meaning in the middle of the mess. If I hadn’t walked through the darkest seasons, I wouldn’t hold the deep understanding of pain that I do today. The roughest roads crafted the deepest empathy. I know exactly what it feels like to be drowning which has given me the ability to see the silent battles of those around me. It allows me to look a struggling teenager in the eyes and tell them, “I see you, I know the weight of this, and you are not alone,” and truly mean it.

There is no word in the human language more powerful than ‘broken.’ But there is no phrase more healing than ‘me too.’  When I sit across from another girl who feels completely purposeless and swallowed by sudden anxiety, I don’t offer her empty promises or quick fixes, only my presence. When I look at her, I don’t see a problem to be solved; I see a reflection of the battles I know all too well. In that quiet space of shared vulnerability, the heavy walls of isolation begin to crumble because comfort doesn’t come from having all the answers, it comes from knowing you aren’t the only one asking all the questions.

If you asked me a year ago if I was angry at God, the answer would have been a big fat YES. But today, my answer is different. No. I am not mad at God. Because as brutal and exhausting as this season has been, it has forced me to find purpose in the mess. It has given me the voice to sit with the hurting, look them in the eyes, and say, ‘me too.’

So no, I don’t know when the war inside my mind will finally stop. I don’t know how long this mountain climb will take, or how many more times I am going to trip and fall. I don’t know why the road had to be this heavy, or why the dark seasons had to hurt as deeply as they did.

But I do know that my tears didn’t drown out my faith; they watered it, and as long as I am still navigating the climb, still tripping, and still learning how to breathe through the hard days, I will use my story to make sure the next girl knows she isn’t the only one fighting a war in the dark, she doesn’t need a saviour who prevents the storm; she just needs to know someone survived it.