Finding Life's Purpose

I met with a man in a position of authority recently. “Kurt,” he told me, “I truly believes everything happens for a reason.” I nodded and smiled. He told me how he immigrated to America and achieved success.
 
I didn’t want to belittle his story, but while I put on a smiling face at his comment, inside I cringed. That’s because I used to believe that things happened for a reason. I thought that god had a plan for everyone and there was purpose and meaning for all my tragedies and successes.
 
Yet I always chafed under that idea because it didn’t line-up with my experiences with mental illness. Regardless of my belief in god--which is a different subject—as I got older it became harder for me to believe there was a reason for much of anything. Instead, I realized that experiences just are.

For a long time I wanted to believe that my depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts were going to make me into a greater or better person than I am today. But mental illness doesn’t go away. There’s not a lesson to learn from it. It's not like I wasn’t paying attention while I was driving and got in a car accident and now I should pay more attention on the road. No, my mental health issues are on-going. They always will be a part of me.

Some might argue that there are lessons to learn from this on-going struggle, though. I can use my experiences to help others, as I’m doing right now, they may say.
 
While that may seem like an easy answer, I hope I could help others with mental health issues without having to go through what I have. The idea of having to deal with suicide and feeling a constant state of mental weight on my brain is something I’d love to avoid. I don’t think I’d still need to be going through what I’m going through to share my experiences about mental health.
 
I find that when people say, “Everything happens for a reason,” it minimizes what I have gone through. It makes it seem as though my experiences are a pawn in some sort of larger game of life that can get me someplace whereby I will have “won.”

Based on my experiences I find it far more likely that things in life just are. They happen and there’s no reason. And that’s okay. I don’t need my trials and tribulations to have some grand meaning to know it’s worthwhile for me to be alive and to continue to live.
 
Years ago I learned to be okay with ambiguity (as much as it’s possible, at least) and the weirdness of life. It makes things fun and gives life a sense of adventure.
 
I’ve learned to become okay with life having no universal purpose. It’s up to each of us to come up with it on our own. I’ve chosen to do my best to live a life of service to others, but what you find makes you happy may differ. I continue to experience life with its ups and downs, but what I choose to make of them is my own decision. Anything else deprives us of our autonomy as human beings and limits what we can do and what our struggles mean to us.