If something hard happens to me and I somehow manage to get through it, does that experience make me stronger or better?

No.

I might become stronger or better before, during, or after the hard experience, but it is never the experience itself that makes me stronger or better, despite such prevalent sayings as “Adversity builds character,” and its many variants, or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (cue Kelly Clarkson, who I’ve heard many times, or Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, which I’ve never read). Maybe these are just things people say to make themselves feel better about the suck parts of life. It has a sort of old-timey Protestant flavor to it I think – a feeling that everything has to have a purpose and ultimately be for your own good because it’s all part of the plan. So be sure to eat your vegetables and thank the Lord for your suffering. This is humanity’s way of putting some straight lines and right angles over the wiggly mess that is the reality of life, especially all the nasty bits that we don’t like.

If I get really sick and almost die but then I recover and later I feel stronger because of it, then it was not the sickness itself that made me stronger, The sickness made me weaker, which is why it almost killed me, and there is no good reason to be grateful for that, unless you believe that there is. Getting through a hellish health problem might show me what I’m capable of enduring, which might give me confidence, which could understandably make me feel stronger. But that would be a case of something being revealed to me about myself, and not of something hard helping me out.

When muscles are torn, they can build back stronger, and maybe that could be true of mental health as well – if an experience really breaks you up inside, maybe you rebuild better – but then again, maybe you don’t. It depends on who you are and what your circumstances are like at the time. Reinterpreting the hard stuff in a soft light can be a fun or comforting game to play, but that’s all it really is – a game. The totally sad stories about people who get knocked around by life until it knocks them right into their grave just don’t get mentioned as much, which is another part of the game – the game of counting hits not misses.

I started thinking about this whole concept more as my mind kept revisiting the question of whether or not the two year full-time mission I served for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was an unusually challenging experience, was good for me. Even with all the problems I’ve discovered about The Church I still kept thinking “Well, my mission was good for me, so I can’t really argue with that, and it made made me a better, stronger person in a way I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, so I guess no matter what The Church does, I’ll always have to be grateful to It for my mission experience. But something didn’t feel right about that for some reason.

Eventually I realized that my LDS mission did not make me a better person and I do not owe The Church a thing for it. The experience wasn’t inherently anything in particular on its own, other than what I believed it to be.

Do I regret serving a mission? Yes. Do I feel like I learned a lot and had some very valuable experiences on my mission? Yes. Did I enjoy my mission? Yes. Did I dislike my mission? Yes. If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, would I choose to serve a mission again? No. Am I glad I went on a mission? Yes but it depends on when you ask me. Just like everything in life, it is what is is, depending on who’s looking, when, and where from.

The Church does not deserve my gratitude for my mission experience, I deserve theirs. I personally have done far more for The Church than The Church or any of its members or leaders have ever done for me personally.

The hard parts of life reveal who you are – like a sculptress revealing and refining more of her masterpiece with each strike of the hammer and chisel. But whether life turns you into a beautiful sculpture or hits you too hard and you crumble is not up to you. If it was, everyone would come out looking like Michelangelo’s David or Aphrodite of Knidos.

By the time you come out on the other end of a hard experience and are starting to interpret it in a positive way, you’ve already survived with what you already had going in. As Galen Strawson once said, “What you do follows from what you are.” If you survive the blows of life they can show you what you’re already made of, and while you may get better and you may get stronger, that is a testament to your own strength of character and not to adversity itself. There is no need to seek out adversity in the name of self-improvement – adversity will find you just fine, don’t worry. And there is no need to try and comfort yourself and others by putting a positive label onto every hard and hurtful thing that happens to you – unless of course you truly enjoy doing so, in which case be my guest and knock yourself out kid, you earned it I guess.