“What matters is not what happened to you. What matters is how you walked through the fire.”
— Charles Bukowski
This line comes from Bukowski's posthumous poetry collection, which became the book's title. He knew what he was talking about: ten years of drinking, nearly dying from an ulcer, eleven years at the post office, a violent childhood. He didn't go around the fire. He walked through it and wrote about all of it.
I'm not going to lie to you and say everything will be fine. Maybe it won't. I spent ten years drinking my life away. Worked jobs that killed me a little more every day. Nearly died from an ulcer in a charity hospital. But I didn't stop. Not because I'm a hero. Because I had nothing left to lose. Sometimes that's what freedom is: when you've got nothing left to lose, you finally do what you're supposed to do.