There’s a unique kind of grief that comes from being handed pain you didn’t cause.

You didn’t make a bad choice. You didn’t ignore warning signs. You didn’t mess up. You just… got sick. Your body betrayed you before you ever had a chance to live the way you imagined. That kind of grief doesn’t just ache—it roars. And the question that rises from it, over and over, is the one no one can ever answer:

Why me?

I’ve spent years sitting with that question. I inherited a heart condition that disrupted my life in ways I still don’t have language for. I was too young to know what I would be missing in life. It stole dreams before they could become plans. It reshaped everything—my identity, my relationships, my sense of what’s possible. And worst of all, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t logical. It just was.

There were days the anger consumed me. Days I felt like a victim of a story I never agreed to star in. While others ran marathons and made five-year plans, I was managing symptoms, navigating medical gaslighting, and bargaining with a body that refused to cooperate.

I found some strange comfort in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He wrote it after losing his son to illness—a wound that never really heals. He didn’t try to explain suffering away with spiritual platitudes. He admitted what most people won’t: sometimes, life is brutally unfair. Sometimes there is no reason. And still, somehow, we keep going.

Eventually, the question changes. “Why me?” gives way to “What now?”

What now, with this body? This pain? This life I didn’t ask for?

We start small. We tell the truth about the loss, even when it makes people uncomfortable. We allow the anger to have a voice. We claim our right to grieve not just what happened, but what never got the chance to happen.

And then—we respond. Not with toxic positivity, but with presence. With agency. With the fierce decision to live a life that still holds meaning, even when it looks nothing like the one we dreamed.

Fairness may never come. But what can come is peace and recognition that life has handed me more to deal with than I thought I could. But I did. It’s given me compassion for myself and others. It’s taught me to advocate. I refuse to disappear uneventful in life.

And a deep, unshakable knowing that while we didn’t choose the pain, we can choose what we do with it.

Sometimes, survival itself is the story. And telling the truth about what it costs—that’s where the healing begins.  Join me, won’t you?