Divine punishment

I often thought that every bad thing I experienced was karma from the harm I inflicted onto others. I always found a way to connect whatever was happening to me back to something I had done to someone else. If I was hurting, I must have deserved it. If someone betrayed me, maybe it was because I had betrayed someone before. If something good was taken away from me, maybe I was simply being given back what I had once taken from someone else.

So, I reduced my suffering down to some sort of divine intervention and told myself to push through. I treated every painful experience like a lesson I was being forced to learn, or some sort of punishment I had to accept. It was just something I had to get through.

Because if every bad thing was punishment, then what was I constantly being punished for?

I started realizing that maybe I had been making myself responsible for things that were never my burden. Not everything that happened to me was the consequence of something I had done. Sometimes life just happens in ways that have nothing to do with whether or not you are a good person.

If my suffering wasn’t punishment, then there wasn’t always going to be some clear explanation for it. I couldn’t just tell myself to endure it because I was paying some sort of karmic debt.

Maybe… I can take responsibility for the way I’ve hurt people and still believe that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life suffering in return.