We can’t take away suffering, we can’t change what happened—but we can choose to find the gift in our lives. We can even learn to cherish the wound.
There’s a Hungarian adage that says you find the darkest shadow beneath the candle. Our darkest and brightest places—our shadows and our flames—are intertwined. My most terrifying night, the first one in Auschwitz, taught me a vital lesson that has enhanced and empowered my life ever since. The very worst circumstances gave me the opportunity to discover the inner resources that helped me again and again to survive. My years of introspection, of being alone and working hard as a ballet student and gymnast, helped me survive hell; and hell taught me to keep dancing for my life.
Life—even with its inevitable trauma, pain, grief, misery, and death—is a gift. A gift we sabotage when we imprison ourselves in our fears of punishment, failure, and abandonment; in our need for approval; in shame and blame; in superiority and inferiority; in our need for power and control. To celebrate the gift of life is to find the gift in everything that happens, even the parts that are difficult, that we’re not sure we can survive. To celebrate life, period. To live with joy, love, and passion.
Sometimes we think that if we move on from loss or trauma, if we have fun and enjoy ourselves, if we continue to grow and evolve, that we’re somehow dishonoring the dead, or dishonoring the past. But it’s okay to laugh! It’s okay to have joy! Even in Auschwitz we were celebrating in our minds all the time, cooking feasts, arguing over how much caraway you put in the best rye bread, how much paprika in Hungarian chicken paprikash. We even held a boob contest one night! (Guess who won?)
I can’t say that everything happens for a reason, that there’s a purpose in injustice or suffering. But I can say that pain, hardship, and suffering are the gift that helps us grow and learn and become who we are meant to be.
During the final days of the war, we were starving to death and cannibalism broke out in the camp. I was immobile on the muddy ground, hallucinating with hunger, praying for a way to keep living without succumbing to eating human flesh. And a voice said, “There’s grass to eat.” Even at death’s door, I had a choice. I could choose which blade of grass to eat.
I used to ask, “Why me?” But now I ask, “Why not me?” Perhaps I survived so I can choose what to do with what happened, and how to be here now. So I can show others how to choose life, so my parents and all the innocents didn’t die in vain. So I can turn all the lessons I learned in hell into a gift I offer you now: the opportunity to decide what kind of life you want to have, to discover the untapped potential lying in the shadows, to reveal and reclaim who you really are.
Honey, may you also choose to give up the prison and do the work to be free. To find in your suffering your own life lessons. To choose which legacy the world inherits. To hand down the pain—or to pass on the gift.