Well-meaning words like “things happen for a reason” can sometimes wound the most, especially when they rush to explain what hasn’t yet been lived through. In moments of heartbreak, collapse, and disorientation, the need to assign meaning often becomes a way to avoid the truth of what is. This piece explores what happens when we stop searching for a reason, and begin, instead, to see clearly.
I hope I never forget the feeling I felt when my ex had left me; I was in our former condo on a beautiful Las Vegas day crying to my best friend at the time about how my heart had been ripped out of my chest and his voice on the other line trying to reassure me, “you know things happen for a reason,” and the almost immediate feeling of disconnection between my heart and my head.
It was almost as if, by that phrase, a blade had sliced through the events of my life and my ability to understand and interpret those events.
I’ve heard this phase a lot in my life, when I had to leave my first grad program because I just wasn’t in the right mental space to be there and depression began to engulf my life, and I heard it again when the business I had helped build imploded yet again, not because of a market change but because I myself was down for the count and unable to rise back up, and I heard it a lot when I found myself staring at the ceiling for weeks on end, unable to get out of bed or work or even shower and brush my teeth, unable to even want anything.
Yes I have heard some form of, “things happen for a reason” a lot in my life, and while the people saying have the best intentions and are saying it from a place of support, to give you something to trust in right now in this moment as hope is being restored, sometimes it can have the opposite effect than support.
When you’re in the very middle of a collapse in your life, when the ship you are on is actively sinking, being told that “things happen for a reason” often feels less like a source of hope and more like the exile of interpretation.
When you’re in the very middle of a collapse in your life, being told that ‘things happen for a reason’ often feels less like hope and more like exile.
Why This Harmless Phrase Harms
On the surface, this phrase, “things happen for a reason,” appears innocuous enough, and it is only said out of kindness and concern, as an attempt to create connection between each other in the hope of soothing a wound which may have disrupted the entire fabric of reality for the listener.
The problem with the phrase is that the moment you accept it and take it in, you are forced into a trap where you have to start hunting for a reason for the suffering, and when your life is in pieces with no way to tell up from down, that hunt will invariably turn into blaming yourself for the circumstances.
I did this for years without knowing it in relationships and business and even in my own relationship to my body.
When the person that I loved with all my heart did something unkind to me, I told myself that there was a reason that we were together, that it was a process of us discovering ourselves and growing stronger together as if there were something cosmic to it, that it were fated for us to be together, thereby creating a story for the pain I felt to be part of a bigger and beautiful story of our relationship together.
When the installers for my business collapsed, I spun the story that I was being taught the power of resilience, that I needed to endure another business setback in order to “learn the lesson” of persistence.
Every single time, I missed the reality of what was actually occurring in front of me because I was too busy searching for a reason.
Every single time, I missed the reality of what was actually occurring in front of me because I was too busy searching for a reason.
I was editing reality to fit into a storyline so that my suffering might be more palatable.
The Hidden Damage of Premature Meaning
Meaning-making isn’t a bad thing, certainly not, and us as humans use it as the fundamental mode of engagement with the world, and ultimately its how we make sense of life itself, and yet timing certainly matters.
When you force a “reason” too soon, three things can potentially happen:
- You stay in the harm longer than you should.
The story created by the “reason” can make the pain seem necessary and sometimes even noble, so that it can become the rope you hang on to while the ship sinks. - You lose touch with reality.
You start relating to the story of events and not the events themselves. Reality, thus, becomes something you edit to suit the plot or narrative you’ve sold yourself. - You cut off the natural process of collapse.
Instead of letting things fall apart as perhaps is needed in life, you keep shoring them up with belief and hope, until you can no longer tell the difference between what’s worth saving and what’s already dead.
However, the biggest problem is that narratives are not reality, they’re simply interpretations of it, and yet we can begin to believe that they are reality, and as we all know interpretations can be wrong.
When the story or narrative is wrong then the decisions you make from it will be wrong as well, that’s how someone can wake up years later wondering how they ended up in this life, a place that they had never consciously chosen.
The Seduction of the “Reason”
Part of the danger of “things happen for a reason” is that it sounds so completely reasonable; we get to shrug our shoulders and say “of course,” because it offers almost instant relief by making the unbearable seem bearable.
In our culture today, we have become addicted to that feeling of the instant resolution, wanting to make the wound stop bleeding now.
So much of this search for instant clarity and resolution, seems to stem for the inability to sit with Keats’ “negative capability,” which is the ability to remain in uncertainty, mystery, or doubt without rushing to find logical answers or clear resolutions, or as he puts it, being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Keats’ saw the poet or great thinker as holding “negative capability” in 1818, so this isn’t something that is new to our culture today, however because of the technology we have today, the purpose for an event to soothe the confusion of life can happen almost instantaneously, we no longer get the dignity to sit with our pain and dwell.
When you force a ‘reason’ too soon, you cut off the natural process of collapse, and with it, the chance to see what’s real.
In this rush for quick resolution, I believe we sell ourselves short because we don’t give the pain and the collapse of self that comes with it the amount of time that is truly needed to strip away the illusions we’ve been living in.
When you’re in the ruins of a life, the absence of a “reason” feels like a void, and in that void, you’ll grab at anything that makes you feel anchored, even if that anchor is just another lie.
A Better Way to Hold Pain
When my own story stopped working, when the scaffolding of my life came down and the identity I had built on it cracked beyond repair, I didn’t pivot into a brighter narrative and I certainly didn’t pretend I was “bouncing back.”
I did something that felt, at first, like giving up: I stopped asking “Why did this happen?” and started asking “What is actually happening right now?”
I was done looking for the cosmic reason, those fates spinning the web of my life, nor was I trying to appeal to a higher plan from divinity, I was only concerned with the raw and unfiltered truth of this moment and the next.
While that may sound very zen, what I began to find was that the truth of my life was oftentimes very ugly, it was filled with loneliness and shame and the silence of the people I thought would stand by me.
Narratives are not reality; they are interpretations of it, and when the story is wrong, the life you build from it will be wrong as well.
This process of dwelling in, and not running from, the moment would sometimes bring about the shock of the belief I had that love meant safety and that trust meant protection, and I began to see that these beliefs that I formed when I was very young had been carried over into adulthood so that I saw the ways I had bent myself to fit inside the story I wanted, instead of seeing reality as it is.
We can love and trust others and that doesn’t mean we are protected from pain, people are fallible and not the ideals I had built them in my narrative.
Ultimately, what I found in this space, without the pressure of trying to make sense of it, was that I could finally breathe for the first time in years, I could feel the loss and hurt and pain without immediately justifying it, and I could see the situations without distortion, so that a deeper sense of clarity began to emerge.
What Letting Go of the Story Gave Me
Letting go of the story, “the reason,” didn’t make the pain vanish nor did it turn the loss into something I was grateful for, at least not right away, but it did give me my life back.
When you let go of the “reason,” you stop relating to what happened as a puzzle to be solved, and you start relating to it as an experience to be lived through, so that you’re no longer bound to perform some sort of pain or rehearse the same old justifications to yourself.
You can begin to rebuild, not from the wreckage of the old story, but from the solid ground of what’s real.
Letting go of “reason” doesn’t mean life is meaningless, it simply means you’re making space for the truth to emerge in its own time, and allowing collapse to do what it’s meant to do, to strip away what’s false, so what’s real can survive.
When I stopped forcing my life into a story, I didn’t get a neat conclusion, but what I got was better: a beginning I could trust.
Learn more about our perceptions and emotions
Letting go of the story didn’t erase the pain, but it gave me my life back, grounded not in illusion, but in truth.
What’s a phrase you’ve been told during hard times that helped, or hurt, more than you expected?
This is the heart of what I teach in my work: you don’t need a better story, you need to see what’s real.
If you’re ready for a guided way to do this, without toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, or performance, my 4-week journal The Art of Falling Apart will walk you through it. It’s the exact process I used to rebuild after my own collapse, and it’s made for thinkers, seekers, and creators who’ve lost the plot and want a self they can finally trust again.
Get The Art of Falling Apart here for just $7
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Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist who walked away from the academy to write at the edge; where poetry meets philosophy and transformation starts with ruin. At samuelgilpin.com, he explores the deep architecture of change, not with hacks or hype, but with language that sharpens and thought that lingers. He holds a PhD in English literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, raw, and precise. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights. Download his free guide, Dangerous by Design, and start reading like your mind depends on it. Or sign up for his free course, The 5-Day Poetic Reset.
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