I call it resilience... i believe it is the best definition of the word. If you really want to know what i believe about this... well, i guess regardless i'm going to give my view... this is the view that lets me go on. Its all religious too... but anyways, i am the fullest believer in reincarnation. I believe that in each life we gain wisdom and bring it with us to our next life, and it is the experiences in life that unlock that wisdom inside us, (hence the quote, "sometimes it takes us to the bottom of our misery to understand the truth" because it is at those points that we unlock that wisdom.) Resilience is one of the tougher wisdoms to learn... i believe it is one of the last one's we must learn... or maybe there isn't an order at all, but its up there in difficulty to attain... that is the only thing that keeps me going... just knowing that i am resilient. Now, how to bring that into one's life would be the tougher part... I keep doing this time after time... I get myself back up, and i pump myself up enough to move on and really go out there aiming to make something of my life... now, this hasn't happened majorly many times for me... right now is really #2. The first time... i had gotten over past things, everything was fine, i isolated myself for quite awhile... like, all of last summer, came back in the fall for school, my junior year, one of my last chances to raise my grades before colleges would look on them for my acceptance... but then things, situations, people came along, and i hadn't realized how fragile i actually was... and completely came right back down again. This summer is try #2. It will be my senior year next year, and my very last chance before i apply for college. Once i make it halfway past the year, i guess i may or may not be able to share a success story with you. But in regards to the title of your entry... my pain has meaning for me... each and every single day. It makes me more creative, more caring, more understanding, and without it, i wouldn't have gotten any of the personality traits that i see as good in myself. Though at the moment i am fighting for a couple of those back after my atrocious experiences of the last year. I guess none of this really give you much to help, just my story... And maybe my insight may do something, as i hope it does... but the one thing i pride myself in being able to do, is force myself back up after having fallen... though sometimes it takes longer than others... And once you have learned resilence, you will take it with you for the rest of eternity. And that is the reason i can now look forward to the future no matter what.
~Julie

"Sometimes it takes us to the bottom of our misery to understand the truth..."
~Gustav Havel - existentialist