You did not ask to be planted in stony ground, to feel the frost arrive before you understood the season, to watch the people you loved most become the lessons you needed most — and yet here you are, still breathing, still reaching your stubborn green face toward an uncertain sun. The road will break you. Let it. Not because pain is noble or suffering is holy, but because the self that survives the breaking is a self that was forged, not merely found — hammered into shape by every blow you thought would be the last, and weren’t.