The Hard Truth About Growth.
The way to thrive in 2025.
Happy holidays Bluezone family. As the year draws to a close, I hope you’ve celebrated your wins and reflected on your lessons learnt in 2024. For the coming year, I wish you unshakeable self-belief and diligent strength to face life’s hardships. As I’ve come to realise, growth is inextricably linked to our light-hearted engagement with both.
With eyes turned inward, relics of an ancient time disguise themselves like jagged stones in vacant ruins. Forgotten feelings flung into a dark abyss with a note written in pencil— ‘to be dealt with, later!’ Inevitably, later never comes. So it splatters and it shatters, but it doesn’t dissipate. It sits, calcifying, growing hard and ugly. When I step forth in the world, the rhythmic click-clacks of self-assured steps scoring a widened smile, whispers beckon the question: am I truly healed or just distracted? Like a blade hidden in a pool of feathers, a soft exterior obscures disaster. Hidden calamities show themselves in holding patterns; bad backs, anxious shivers, a stomach that quivers any chance it gets. Before long the symptom is the issue and the root cause becomes fogged, like a face behind steamy shower glass, too hazy to identify.
When I think back to moments of great thriving in my life, there is a sense of being in complete sync with the world. My body, mind and spirit become like open borders, energy flows effortlessly between them. Freedom and vulnerability coalesce into raw power. The dreams and feelings I bury, repress, and discard become like rocks tied to straw ropes around my waist. I drag them with me everywhere I go. The ropes cut at my skin. Bruises burst into blood. When sufficiently deceived, the wounds appear like mysterious inflictions. Indeed, neglected emotions shape our behaviours in ways we can’t understand.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
- Carl Jung
Jung’s words reveal an uncomfortable truth: what we suppress doesn’t disappear; it shapes us, whether we like it or not, until we confront it. Hardships overcome glint like silver linings, clarifying our raison d’être.1 Challenges championed are trophied like gleaming medals on proud breast pockets. We may say to someone, ‘I went through x, and it was the worst thing that could have ever happened to me, but I turned it around and look who I am now!’ At the best of times, suffering alchemises the greatest qualities from the darkest of circumstances. Hardships renounced, however, crack our world the way a single cut in the ice can sever the whole. It destabilises our base; it disfigures us from within. In such cases, the easiest path seems to be to simply forget about such pains entirely. To bury them deep, to never tell anyone, to decrease their importance by pretending not to care.
There is a sadness to the tragedies we hide from ourselves. To the dreams we don’t say out loud, to the hopes we never admit to those persistent eyes staring back at us in the mirror. It’s like Michelangelo imagining the form of David2 in rough rock and working to erase the shape from his mind. Instead of seeing the possibility of beauty carved from roughness, he sees the chance for failure, ridicule and inadequacy. Such duality extends itself beyond the finished product. The art we carve from the fabric of ugliness, whether it be grief, heartbreak, loss or pain, stands solidified as a memento of persistence. Those who look upon it admire it, yet the artist, biased by the familiarity of its creation, sees it as a relic of resilience and transcendence. The pride that comes from overcoming hardships is knowing the sheer weight of hardship itself! Ironically, this is the least enviable part of it. People love the rags to riches story, yet would never want to be in rags themselves. It’s a spectating audience with no insight into the truth of the art’s creation and one lonely champion, a misunderstood victor of adversity. The world offers us hardship, and we carve it into form. The world is endless roughness, sharp and heavy, and the human plight is all caught up in it. To alchemise the ugly into beauty is to turn the roughest rock into the smoothest marble.
Why choose the harder path if the route of comfort appears clear and easy before us?
Perhaps it is the wrong question to ask. When it’s all said and done, our hardships provide the shape to our struggle. Friction is needed to smoothen the stone. Throughout my short career, I have come to realise that our suffering is not our burden to absolve but our privilege to carry. I’m not here to tell you to go to therapy or to implore you to connect with your inner child— if it doesn’t appeal to you, don’t. There is a danger to digging into dark subconscious memories that may remain like lilies, slightly above the surface of your disposition. Pulling at them can breach the whole dam, so be careful. Yet similarly, uncovering such beliefs, thoughts, tragedies, and fears— reveals hidden clues to why you are the way you are.
More times than not, there is a version of you buried beneath the rubble of unresolved trauma. A version of you that remains hurt, filled with anger, one you never a gave a chance to cry. A version you never even looked at, listened to, or considered as ‘you’ — what if facing them is exactly what you need? What if who you are is exemplified, magnified by the integration of the shadow that follows you through every step of your life? Into every bar, into every shameful act, into every heartbreak that cut you deeper than you’d like to admit. In your brightest hours of artistic expression, it’s this same shadow that breaches along the border of the intangible into the product itself. It’s the duality that gives it shape. Letting this shadow out of the cage means relinquishing control over yourself. It’s allowing a complexity to flourish that lives in fullness between good and evil, right and wrong, one that teeters on the edge like someone with a choice.
Whichever mountain you set your sights on this year, embrace the difficulty in your stride. It is our hardship, our plight, that uncovers our greatest virtue. The most powerful gift any creative has is their lived experience—the raw, unfiltered truth of who they are. To stand out is to lean into that truth, to let the imperfect complexity of your perspective shine through, and to alchemise that into your craft. To stand on top of your pile of misfortunes like it glitters gold. Beneath all that roughness, something is waiting to emerge—your very own David carved not despite your hardships but because of your willingness to face them.
Creating this blog has been one of the most awesome things I’ve done this year. Engaging with talented writers and engaging readers alike continues to be a joy. If this is one of the first articles you’ve read, or if you’ve enjoyed several— thank you! I’m excited to continue next year and will be turning on paid subscriptions at some point soon. If you’d like to support me to keep writing these pieces and to receive more Bluezone, you can pledge your support or share this with a friend who may enjoy it. I have some great ideas for new projects next year and I’m excited to share them with you soon. Happy New Year — iL.
Reason for being.
I LOVE THE WHOLE POST, it's very healing and inspiring Ilan.✨️ and this one stood out in my heart—Your very own David carved not despite your hardships but because of your willingness to face them.😭❤️💯
One of the best posts I've read on Substack.