In the Furnace of Discomfort, we find Ourselves

There is a duality of life, a pattern that I’ve noticed, where chasing the thing often doesn’t bring the thing; it brings the opposite, and chasing the opposite often brings the thing you’re chasing. For example, freedom requires discipline. Chasing happiness usually makes you miserable, surrender brings control, and the road to heaven often feels like hell.

We can define self-development as actively improving your knowledge, skills, character, and overall quality of life. People will often run from pain and suffering. But the pain and suffering are what you need to become the version of yourself you most want to be. Somewhere along the line, we became conditioned to the idea that negative experiences and negative emotions are bad and are to be avoided at all times, and in fact, we should aspire to happiness and positive feelings. In reality, this does not work. Chasing happiness in the now often means chasing fun, joy, and euphoria, and the things that describe hedonism don’t bring happiness; they bring misery.

The only way we can become the best version of ourselves, the version of ourselves that can achieve the dreams that we have set for ourselves, is through pain and suffering. When I left high school, I had a lot of energy and nowhere to put it, a lot of frustration with certain things in my life, and I decided I wanted to become a boxer. So I trained religiously, moved to Mombasa with my brother, and trained three times a day. and I worked relentlessly. In those moments, it was terrible for the first 2-3 weeks of our training. My body was sore. In terms of physical effort, I had never experienced such difficulty in my entire life up to that point. I would walk home, I could barely walk up the stairs, sore for days, mentally drained, it was brutal. But within a month, my body was conditioned and ready. This is how adaptable we are. Change seems alien, cruel, and terrible at the moment, but our bodies and our minds are so versatile that if you push through the initial barrier, most people stop. Your body adapts, and it grows.

So I’ve been training for about six months. I came back to Nairobi for a break. At the end of it, I’m at dinner. I ran into a friend of mine, he asked me, are you still training i said yes, to which he responded  I have a fight for you in two weeks. I wasn’t training for the last month, so I was not in fight shape, but I said yes. I woke up the next day and I realized I might have made a very big mistake. Because even though I had been training, I wasn’t ready for this at this moment.

I was scared, I was nervous, I was anxious, I was tense. All sorts of negative emotions. But I said, you know what? Why not? So for the next two weeks, I’m preparing myself as best as I could, and fight day came. I woke up, no appetite. My hands were trembling. I thought of every excuse under the sun not to go. I’m sick, I have the flu, I’m in the countryside. I was even going to say one of my grandparents died. But something, a little voice in the back of my head, said, Just do it, go. So I went, and that journey was the longest of my life, from my house to the ring. Everything was heightened; I was so anxious, stressed, and tense. By the time I reached, everything in me was panicking, my vision was blurry, and my heart was pounding. Anxiety was building, and I saw the crowd of people that I would be fighting in front of. And it was just such an overwhelming experience that every part of me wanted to run. But I was already there, and these feelings kept bubbling and bubbling, until eventually I was standing across from this guy. And the feelings feel like they’re rising, like they’re about to erupt and leave me collapsed under all the weight. But the moment the bell rang and the whistle was blown, it all disappeared. All the fear, all the tension was gone. I lost the first round. He came back in the second and dropped him in the second. but in the third, I expended my gas tank. I was fatigued, and I lost the third round and the fight.

But even though I had lost, I survived, and it felt amazing. I felt so good at that moment, like I was in another realm, and that’s when it hit me. I felt amazing, not because I had lost, but because I had done something my mind didn’t think was possible. I had suffered through negative emotions and worked through them. And on the other side, I had grown. I carry the confidence and respect I gained for myself in those experiences. How you handle stress is a greater indicator of your ability to succeed than any other metric. When you’re stressed, your body wants to revert to its comfort mode, its settings of, oh, let’s not do anything hard, let’s not do anything difficult. If you can overcome those feelings, then that is where growth is. That is where true self-development is. Overcoming your barriers and your limits and growing into someone bigger, someone who can handle more. The results you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding. And I’ll say this, any single human being on this earth can change and be the best version of themselves. But most people won’t, In fact, 92% of people never achieve their goals.

Your ego is your greatest asset, but also your greatest enemy. Because growth means death of the ego, and the ego does not want to die at all costs. Even if it’s death, means it will be reborn as something stronger. So it will trick you into thinking that, you can’t do this, oh, I’m not the type to do this. And you have to beat that noise out. There are many people who cannot beat their ego, and they died a long time ago. You’ve met these people, filled with negativity, filled with anger, filled with resentment. That’s because they know they could have done more, and they didn’t. They never forced themselves to change. If you think the price of sacrifice is high, wait until you have to pay the price of regret. If you limit your choices to only what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. You’re doing a disservice to the version of yourself that you could be, and your lack of effort is almost an insult to the people who believe in you.

Self-development and pain are intertwined because only through suffering can growth appear. Don’t run from it. it seems scary, it looks like a big monster chasing you, but I’m telling you, if you turn around and stare it in the face, it disappears. And so too does your existence. You are reborn as someone stronger. For it is a shame for one to go through this world and not know the strength they’re capable of. You would be surprised how amazing you can be. If you challenge yourself, cut out the distractions, the noise, set goals that genuinely scare you, and try with every fiber of your being to achieve them, I believe that, whether or not you achieve those goals, you will succeed. And you will become a version of yourself that you cannot recognize, and that version of you will be happy.

Article by Kagai Muriithi, Bachelor of Commerce Student