The Good Part

You know that song that is playing everywhere online, “The Good Part” by AJR? Yes it is a real song that goes beyond the words, “so can we skip to the good part?”. But the reason it resonates with everyone is because we all want to skip the hard and uncomfortable parts of life and get to the good stuff, it is like eating dessert first and skipping dinner and the healthy stuff entirely. The hard stuff, aka real life, is often difficult to navigate and it is normal to want to skip to the good parts. It is normal to wish for an easy and good life, no one voluntarily wants to go through the tough times. We get on our knees and pray for smooth sailing. But reality can be cruel and most of us will find that hard times are often part of our story. Unlike in a movie where we are clued in that something bad is about to happen when the music gets louder and sounds ominous, real life doesn’t usually give us a warning when something bad is about to happen.

We go into our doctor’s office for test results and they reveal troubling results, or a partner holds your hand and says that they no longer want to be together, or after working harder and studying harder than you have ever done in your life you find you didn’t pass the test or get into the school you were hoping for…. Bad things will happen in life, our childhoods may not have been ideal or even slightly good, we will often suffer because of our poor choices, but we can either live life with joy in spite of all it, or we can live a life of disappointment and anger. It is very much a choice.

Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment help(s) us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken. -Paulo Coelho

There are few things better than slipping into a comfy pair of pajamas or wearing “yoga clothes” all day, discovering the joys of no underwire bras, eating a gorgeous meal you did not have to shop for, cook or clean up after, hearing the words, “your cancer is remission” and/or “you have been chosen by a birth mom and are going to be a parent!”.

Those are the good parts, but before you get to experience them often you have to wear the nice looking, but slightly uncomfortable clothes, you have to live through decades where pushup bras with lots of wires were your only choice, you have to shop, cook and clean up after a lot of meals, you will hear, “you have cancer” and “sorry, they chose someone else” or “pregnancy isn’t an option for you.”

There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.
-Michael J. Fox

It is so easy to fall into a pattern of blame and anger, scream in rage into the void “where is my happy ending?”, or “why me?”, but here is a gentle reminder, we were never promised good or easy lives. Life is often hard and while we think it would be amazing to skip to the good part, often in retrospect, living through the not so great part turns out to be the good part. Living with an autoimmune disease or chronic illness sucks, but it often teaches us to listen to our bodies in ways we could never have imagined. We learn to celebrate the good days and figure out how to make the bad days easier. Finding out you have infertility issues may at first seem like the end of the world, but in time, when you have created your family through fostering, adoption and/or surrogacy you might find yourself forgetting the dark times. It's funny how the bad times don’t seem so bad anymore because you are now living the life you envisioned and are finally a “Mom” or “Dad.”

Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
-Eliza Tabor Stephenson

So what is the take away from all this?
•Life will be hard
•Limit your time huddling under the covers and screaming into the void
•Process the pain and hardship
•Decide if there is something to learn from the disappointment
•Chose a path forward
•Slay the day

It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life
It's a new life
For me
And I'm feeling good
I'm feeling good
I feel so good
I feel so good
-Michael Bublé, Feeling Good

As always, thank you for allowing us to be a part of your life and your journey.
All the best, Team SG