EssayENIdeas
Maybe It Wasn’t a Loss. Maybe It Was a New Direction.
On people who leave, plans that fall apart, and the strange habit of wanting to make sense of everything in hindsight.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
4 min read
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On people who leave, plans that fall apart, and the strange habit of wanting to make sense of everything in hindsight.
Benjamin Trinidad Segura
4 min read
There’s one thought I find incredibly comforting and quite dangerous at the same time:
Maybe everything happens for a reason.
Someone leaves your life. A job doesn’t work out. A relationship falls apart. An opportunity you’ve worked toward for a long time suddenly disappears.
And at some point, sometimes months or years later, you look back and think: Maybe it was for the best.
Maybe I would never have met that other person. Maybe I would never have had that idea. Maybe I would never have found the courage to change something.
Maybe it had to happen exactly that way.
But did it really have to?
I find this question interesting because it reveals quite a lot about how we deal with things we can’t control.
We want to understand why something happens. Especially when it hurts.
And maybe that’s exactly where the problem lies.
We’re so busy looking back and giving our lives a logical story that sometimes we forget how much of it was really just chance.
Not everyone who leaves us was automatically bad for us. Not every rejection was a hidden opportunity. And not every painful experience had to happen so we could grow from it.
Sometimes we simply lose something that mattered to us.
Sometimes people make decisions we don’t understand.
And sometimes something doesn’t work out even though we did everything right.
Still, I believe there’s something incredibly valuable in this thought.
Just perhaps in a different place than we might first expect.
What if not everything happens for a reason, but we can decide for ourselves what to make of what happened?
To me, that’s a huge difference.
In the first case, we trust that there’s some grand plan somewhere that we just don’t understand yet.
In the second, we take on some of the responsibility ourselves for how our story continues.
And that doesn’t mean we’re responsible for everything that happens to us.
But perhaps we are responsible for what we make of it.
I can’t control whether someone stays in my life. I can’t prevent myself from being disappointed. I can’t guarantee that my decisions will always lead to the outcome I want.
What I can influence, though, is whether I eventually allow these experiences to be more than just a painful chapter in my past.
Maybe I learn something from it. Maybe my perspective changes. Maybe next time I make a different choice.
And maybe none of that happens right away.
Maybe I’m simply disappointed, sad, or angry.
That’s okay, too.
Because I think we’ve become so used to feeling we have to turn every negative experience into something positive as quickly as possible.
A breakup becomes a journey of self-discovery. Getting fired becomes a fresh start. A failed project becomes a valuable lesson.
All of that can be true.
But it doesn’t have to be true right away.
Sometimes they just need time.
And sometimes they need someone who understands that things really fucking suck right now.
But only later, through what we make of it.
That’s why I don’t necessarily believe that everyone who leaves my life was meant to go.
Or that every missed opportunity was actually a good thing.
But I do believe my life doesn’t automatically have to get worse just because things turned out differently from what I’d imagined.
And maybe that’s the more beautiful thought.
That our lives don’t have to be fully planned from the start to still add up to a story in the end.
A story with detours, wrong decisions, chance encounters, meetings, losses, and moments we could never have foreseen.
But maybe we can make sure that not everything was for nothing.
And I think I can live with that pretty well.
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