Pain is something that is inevitable in life. No matter your age or occupation, no matter how rich and famous you are, pain will find its way to your front door.

I’m not talking about physical pain, such as breaking a bone or touching a hot stove. No, I’m talking about the pain invisible to others.

The pain that lurks in the depths of our minds, slowly looking for an opportunity to overtake our lives and have us wallow in acloak of self-pity.

Every human that has ever stepped foot on this planet has dealt with mental pain. The kind of pain that occupies the mind and our conscience on a daily basis without revealing itself to the outside world.

So, if every single person deals with this, then how is it that some people allow it to work for them, while others end up drowning in their own minds?

The difference is in learning to use pain as fuel. That’s how you are able to prevent it from compromising your life and keeping you in a constant state of sorrow and self-pity.

Think about a time when you weren’t in a good place, a time when you hated every day and things were weighing heavy on your mind. That pain and struggle leaves you with two options.

The first option is to constantly worry about your situation and how bad things are getting, allowing your problems and issues to snowball, while the second option is to identify what’s causing pain in your life. You can use that to your advantage by realizing that the very thing that is making you miserable will give you the motivation and drive to change your current circumstances.

By experiencing life at its worst, you find out things about yourself. You find out exactly what it is that you want out of life. That’s something you wouldn’t figure out if things were always sunny and happy.

I like to think of each mentally painful time I have experienced in my life as adding another piece of wood to my life’s fire. Each obstacle you overcome serves a purpose, and further gives your life a direction and helps you to figure out what you want out of life. Just as each time you add more wood to a fire it serves a purpose to help keep the fire burning bright. Without the piles of wood, the fire cannot continue to burn.

If you didn’t have any firewood, aka difficult experiences, then you wouldn’t have a fire. You wouldn’t have any passion because you have no reason to enjoy the good times, because you wouldn’t have experienced any bad times.

The pain and difficulties that we experience in life are essential for us to have. As difficult as it is to deal with, you must realize that when you are experiencing pain, something worthwhile is right around the corner.

When we are dealing with difficulties in life, our mind will try to do anything to get us to a place where we are happy and not putting so much stress on ourselves. This is why we find our focus in life amidst extreme struggle, because our mind goes into a mode where it separates all the good feelings from the painful ones.

The good feelings and aspirations you have left are what we decide to pursue in life, and therefore you wouldn’t have known if you didn’t square up with pain face-to-face.

When we find ourselves in a situation where life is almost too much to take in, we have to remind ourselves that this pain is going to be the reason that we excel in life.

All we have to do is find a way to battle through it and keep our eyes on that fire burning inside of us. Remember, by getting through this tumultuous time, we will have more firewood to add to our life’s fire. A fire that completely burns off of individual painful experiences. A fire that strengthens and produces enough fuel to light the way for a path that leads to success.