If you are/were able to mind-over-matter something, to push your body’s limits, perform some feat of resilience or training, overcome great pain, then your body was always capable of it. You were gifted with it, it’s not something you should take full credit for.
Even say you are disabled, and you managed to overcome that by compensating in an incredible way: the story is not one of pure will. Willpower is not magic. It cannot fill in for an ability that isn’t there. It can only bring out a potential or exploit an opportunity that exists.
When you hear those stories of soldiers who got shot multiple times and still go on to kill entire enemy platoons: That’s not a triumph of the will or faith or courage. It’s a triumph of a rare biological trait in a specific individual, revealed by will or faith or courage.
If you find you have these gifts: enjoy it. *revel* in it. Use it. Get laid on its account. Don’t apologise for having it. Don’t self-flagellate. Don’t grovel under anyone’s resentment. But you don’t need to become a hustleporn grifter.
Encourage people to find or surpass their limits for their own self-actualization. Because the only way to find out where each of us has the ability to push things is to try. But giving people the false expectation & moral statute of similar results is the essence of a grifter.
It’s not “pain-seeking” vs “pleasure seeking”, as has become the mantra of pop resilience psych. Most people have one or two contexts where they experience pain as a sort of pleasure. So it’s actually still pleasure seeking. It’s got an edge, so if they’re obsessed with the tough image, it’s a nice lie they can tell themselves.
Our half-science half-woo worldview overrates the mind, because that’s what we “feel” existence through. But the mind is fragile in most ways, and is not capable of much independent of physiological realities (or technology, which is just an extension of physiology)
There are many systems in this world where we discover/mould 1 incredible human by sacrificing 99 others into depression, pain, and the personal hell of incompatible expectations and self-coercive framing. Others will constantly sign you up for these games without your consent.
.. and very few people will help you out. you have to learn to help yourself. you have to learn to know how & when to ignore criticism of your choices, which is paradoxically achieved by finding a tiny number of high-trust, good-faith people who are the only people allowed to criticize you.
And when it becomes your turn to be the critic:
Are you mature enough as a mentor or teacher to see what kind of toughness each person has and bring that out? Or is your view of the world forever coloured by your hyperspecific personal experience of taming your flight-flight response, which is deeply informed by the traits and physical capabilities you were gifted with?
Are you humble enough to know when something is not replicable– and are you grateful to god or nature that they made you an exception? Are you smart enough to be happy, and spread happiness in others who aren’t like you?