I remember the first time I told someone I was gay. It was a horrendous experience because I felt like I was finally facing that fear that I had had for so many years. And I must admit that it was hard for a long time after that, but I think that the suffering that I experienced from coming out was largely a result of my own expectations about what my life should be like.

You see, for years before I had imagined what it would be like someday to get married and have children and live the perfect life that everyone around me always said was ideal. Because I was so young and dependent on others for my ideas of what an ideal life is, I found the idea of an alternative lifestyle traumatizing.

At first you might have found the title of this article a little offensive. After all, if you’re suffering because you just lost a loved one or because you have a terminal illness or because you just lost your job to the company vice-president’s son, how is that your fault? The fact is, as it taught in many self-help books today, the outside circumstances in your life are often not your fault (although sometimes they are), but it is your response to those circumstances that you can control.

Look at it this way, when I realized that I was gay around the age of 12, I chose to look at my homosexuality as a catastrophe, a curse from God. But I could have chosen to look at it differently. I could have chosen to see it as an opportunity to have a different life from everyone else, to be special, to learn something different in this life than everyone else. And that is how I choose to look at it today.

If you have a terminal illness, of course you’re going to go through a grieving period. But that does not mean that the remainder of your life has to be miserable and sad. It just means that it’s going to end, and that the end is imminent. It also means, however, that the beginning is imminent. We can choose to see death as the beginning of a new experience just as our birth into this realm was.

If you lost your job and don’t know how to pay the mortgage, that can seem like a terrible tragedy. After all, you might lose your house. But who is to say that this experience is necessarily bad? You might learn something very powerful from it, and in six months to a year, we often don’t know what’s going to happen. In today’s world things change very quickly.

I often hear people talking about their weight. What I tell people is this: You can choose to be thin or you can choose to continue eating what you want. Neither choice is necessarily better than the other. But life is filled with choices just like that. You can choose to get an education or you can choose to start working and save more money. Again, neither choice is good or bad.

But these choices often come to us in a way that makes them difficult to resolve in our minds. Because we cannot simply make the choice and then be happy with the consequences of that choice, we suffer. In this way, we cause a great deal of our own suffering.

If you are fat but tell yourself that you can’t stop eating bad food, then bless your obesity, for it is really the product of living a life that you choose. And you can always choose again if that life stops serving you. This is an amazing power that human beings have. You can always choose, and there is always some way that we can respond to our environments. Steven Covey talks about this principle in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People one of the books that I would recommend to anyone under any circumstance, and it’s one that has changed my life. If you can’t afford to buy it, you can check it out at any library. But I do highly recommend that you get a copy of it.

Whatever choice you make, be happy with it. And remember that you can always choose again, no matter what choice you have made.

It’s true that some things in life happen and cause us immense grief. When a loved one passes or a breakup of a long term relationship occurs, of course we will suffer a lot. But that does not mean that that suffering must define our lives. It just means that there is a lesson to be learned and your soul still has room to grow.

Often when you suffer (for what I call legitimate reasons), it is best to allow yourself to feel that pain for a while and allow yourself to work through it. In this way, your spirit grows. Just as the Christian Bible talks about purifying gold with fire, so must our spirits be purified with fire at times. While these times can be frustrating and cause immense suffering, at least you can know that this suffering is not in vain. For that reason, you can often draw some comfort from knowing that your soul is moving closer to God when you suffer.