To my ego

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Your suffering isn't beautiful, but your survival is. There is a dangerous lie in romanticizing pain, in pretending that the shadows that broke you were somehow poetic. Suffering is hideous. It is a brutal, jagged teacher that only speaks in the language of loss. It doesn't refine you with a gentle hand. It burns away parts of who you were, showing you the absolute worst things that can happen to a human heart just to prove a point. It is the most agonizing way to learn a lesson written in scars you never asked for. The beauty isn't in the trauma, and it isn't in what was stolen from you. The beauty is entirely in the fact that you are still here.