Lesson #4: When Life Isn’t Fair: Choosing Forward Anyway

Late Blooming Lessons From Life’s Second Chapter

A journey of discovery. A discovery of self. Pieces of old. Paired with pieces of new.

Lesson #4: When Life Isn’t Fair: Choosing Forward Anyway

“Life is not always fair. Sometimes you get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow.”

Life isn’t fair.
That’s not just a cliché. It’s a hard, gut-punching truth.

No matter how much we plan, how hard we work, or how deeply we hope, challenges will come. Some arrive as mere inconveniences, the kind we shake off and move past without a second thought. Others? They hit like a freight train. They crack open our world and leave us reeling. Grief. Heartbreak. Failure. Loss.

These moments—the ones we never saw coming—are inevitable.
But how we respond? That’s where our power lies.

Do we rise above?
Adapt? Learn? Push forward?
Or do we allow pain and bitterness to anchor us, holding us back with the weight of resentment and self-pity?

Losing Greg—my partner, my person—in the prime of our life together, made me want to scream at the sky:
LIFE IS NOT FAIR.
Why him? Why now? Why take one of the good ones?

It felt so cruel. So senseless.

But grief has a way of making you look around and realize something else. My loss, as personal and devastating as it was, isn’t the only unfairness in the world. Others are grieving too. Wildfires destroy homes. Accidents take lives. Tornadoes. Floods. Infertility. Rejection. Job loss. The list of heartbreak is endless.

That truth doesn’t ease the pain.
But it shifts something inside.
It reminds me I’m not alone in this.

From a young age, we all face the same difficult lesson: Life is not fair. And yet. We keep going.
The difference between people who stay stuck and those who find a way forward? It’s not what they’ve been through. It’s how they choose to move through it.

I know what it feels like to stay stuck.
I lived in that space for a long time.
It felt safe to expect the worst. Predictable. If I didn’t allow myself to feel hope, then disappointment couldn’t gut me. I thought I was protecting myself. But really, I was just surviving. And slowly, that survival mode became a trap.

It’s easy to play the blame game. To point fingers at the unfairness of it all. To dwell on the injustice. But here’s the thing: staying bitter doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t give us back what we lost. It just keeps us tethered to pain.

So what’s the alternative?

Acceptance. Not in a passive way. But as a way to take back our power.

Accept that life is unfair. That we won’t always understand the why. That some days will feel impossibly hard. That we can hate what’s happened and still choose to keep moving.

This isn’t about pretending everything is okay. It’s about giving ourselves permission to move forward, even when nothing makes sense. It’s about choosing growth. Healing. And the possibility of joy. Again.

Because sometimes, the worst moments eventually open the door to something we never expected.
Perspective. Purpose. New beginnings.

When life knocks us down and leaves us breathless, there may be no perfect words to fix it. No reason that makes it all make sense.

But in the mess. In the unfairness. We still have a choice:

Let it consume us.
Or choose. Inch by inch, to rise.

This isn’t about toxic positivity. This is about resilience.
It’s about saying: “I don’t like this. I hate this. But I’m still here.”
And that? That is strength.

At the end of the day, life will keep being unpredictable.
It will bring both joy. And heartbreak.
And we may never fully understand why some things happen the way they do.

But we can still choose to keep going.
We can still choose to live.
Even when life isn’t fair.

Because it’s not about what happens.
It’s about who we become in the process.