Life Delivers Bouquets of Lessons. You're Allowed to Hate Every Flower In Them.

Someone will always tell you how beautiful the arrangement is.

They'll point to the lessons, the growth, the transformation. They'll use words like "gift" and "journey" and "blessing in disguise." They'll marvel at how you're blooming, how you've been pruned into something more refined, how the hard seasons have always made you stronger.

And you're allowed to look at that bouquet of lessons life delivered to your door and say: I hate every single flower in this arrangement.

The Tyranny of Mandatory Gratitude

Here's what 15 years of working with gifted, high-performing leaders has taught me: The most dangerous spiritual bypass is the one that demands you find beauty in your suffering before you've even had a chance to name the damage. Because sometimes it’s discomfort and sometimes it really leaves a mark. Breakage. Festering.

You know this pattern if you've lived it. Something devastating happens. Before you can even catch your breath, someone is rushing toward you with interpretations. "Everything happens for a reason." "This will make you stronger." "One day you'll be grateful for this."

They're holding up the bouquet life just hurled at your face, marveling at the artistry of the arrangement, asking you to admire the composition while you're still spitting out thorns.

When Life Doesn't Even Bother with Flowers

My husband has this way of describing a certain family member of mine. He says every time she comes around, she causes a double hauler full of manure to dump at the base of our driveway.

Not flowers. Not lessons wrapped in pretty tissue paper. Not opportunities for growth disguised as challenges.

Just a massive load of shit, delivered without warning, blocking your way in and out of your own life.

And here's the thing about those deliveries: You can never altogether prevent the drive-by manure dumpings in life. You can see them coming. You can brace for impact. You can tell yourself "this time will be different." You can move, and not leave that family member a forwarding address. Done, in some cases. Harder in the age of now, with information freely available. Point is, that truck is backing up to your property line regardless of your boundaries, your preparation, or your personal growth journey. It does not care. This person does not care.

Better get a wheelbarrow, a shovel, some muck boots and work gloves. This is your workout for the day.

Nobody's going to stand at the base of your driveway marveling at the composition of that pile. Nobody's going to tell you to be grateful for the nutrients. They're just going to expect you to deal with it, because it's on your property now and you're the one who has to get your car out. The tow truck company will swing by and just laugh. The HOA is going to complain. There’s no one you can pay to just make it disappear.

In time, one learns to have a lot of compost bins available. You might even sell the fertilizer eventually. But let's be crystal clear about something: the fact that you can turn shit into something useful doesn't mean you have to thank the person who dumped it there. Or the Universe for making sure you were strong enough to move 5 metric tons of merde in three days or less.

In my Story Quilting work with leaders processing complex transitions, I see this repeatedly: people who have spent years performing gratitude for lessons they never wanted to learn, growth they never consented to, transformations that were forced upon them by circumstance or trauma or other people's unfinished business. And it’s twisted in them like another wound, twin of the original, except they don’t think they’re allowed to incise and drain it.

Pattern Recognition vs. Imposed Meaning

My pattern recognition capacity is what allows me to help high-performers and highly gifted see the systems they're operating within. But pattern recognition is not the same as meaning-making. And this distinction matters desperately.

I can see the pattern in your story. I can help you map the constellation of events, decisions, and consequences. I can show you how this connects to that, how this dynamic echoes that earlier experience. What I cannot do, what I will never do, is tell you what it means to you or insist you be grateful for it. Context is everything.

The gifted adults I work with often have extraordinary pattern recognition themselves. They can see the lessons. They understand the growth. They recognize the transformation. What they need permission to do is hate it anyway, because it’s not helpful to their nature. They didn’t need it.

You can see the pattern and still despise the circumstances that created it. You can have learned invaluable lessons and still wish you'd never had to attend that particular school. You can be measurably stronger and still prefer who you were before you had to develop that strength.

The Designated Adult Problem

For those of us who've been the designated adult in too many relationships, who've had to be the one holding steady while everyone else falls apart, there's an additional layer to this. We get very good at receiving the bouquets graciously. We know how to admire the arrangement, to thank life for the delivery, to display it prominently where everyone can see how well we're handling things.

We've been trained to be grateful for the opportunity to grow, to heal, to become more resilient. We've learned that our value is often tied to our ability to metabolize difficulty and turn it into wisdom that serves others.

But here's what I'm learning in my own Going Feral work: sometimes the most healing thing you can do is leave those bouquets on the porch until they rot. Not because you're bitter. Not because you're refusing to grow. Simply because you're done performing gratitude for lessons you never signed up for in the first place.

The Eight-Way Integrity Knot and Unwanted Growth

My Eight-Way Integrity Knot framework helps leaders make decisions that honor every dimension of their lives. But sometimes the most integrated decision you can make is to reject growth that came at too high a cost.

You can acknowledge you learned something and still calculate that the price wasn't worth it. You can integrate the lessons and still say: I would trade every insight for not having gone through that. You can become measurably better at something and still wish you'd never had to practice it.

This isn't refusing wisdom. It's refusing to let the presence of wisdom retroactively justify the damage.

What the Feral Part of You Already Knows

The wild, untamed part of you that I help people reconnect with in the Going Feral methodology? That part already knows this truth. That part doesn't care about the imposed narrative or the spiritual framework someone else is trying to drape over your experience.

The feral part of you looks at that bouquet of lessons and says: I didn't order this. I don't want it. And I'm not going to pretend it's beautiful just because someone else thinks it should be.

This isn't lack of growth. This is refusal to be colonized by someone else's interpretation of your experience.

Be Loved Before You Lead

My Be Loved, Lead Loved philosophy centers on this: leaders must first be loved unconditionally before they can lead from that filled place. And part of unconditional love is being allowed to have your actual response to your actual experience.

Not the response that makes others comfortable. Not the response that demonstrates you've learned the lesson. Not the response that proves you're evolved enough to transmute suffering into wisdom.

Your actual response. Which might be: I hate every flower in this bouquet. I see them. I acknowledge them. And I hate them ALL.

This is not the same as being stuck. You can hate the bouquet and still move forward. You can refuse to perform gratitude and still integrate what you learned. You can acknowledge the growth and still mourn who you were before you had to grow that way.

For the Gifted Adults Reading This

You who see patterns before others do. You who've been told your whole life that your sensitivity is both your gift and your burden. You who've learned to package your pain into wisdom so efficiently that you sometimes forget you're allowed to just hurt. Maybe you even had a parent like my dad, who loved to tell me how much my perpetual disarray “built character.”

The bouquets life delivers to your door are not yours to love just because someone else finds them beautiful. Your rejection of imposed meaning is not a failure to grow. Your refusal to be grateful for lessons you never wanted is not spiritual immaturity.

It's honesty. It's sovereignty. It's the difference between transformation that happens to you and transformation that you choose.

The Dark Sky Sessions Truth

In my Dark Sky Sessions, I create space for leaders to see clearly without the light pollution of everyone else's interpretations. And what becomes visible in that darkness is often this: you've been carrying gratitude you don't feel for growth you didn't want from lessons you never asked for.

You can put that down now.

Not forever, necessarily. Maybe one day you'll pick up that bouquet again and find something in it that moves you. Maybe you won't. Both responses are valid. Both responses are yours to have.

What I'm Not Saying

I'm not saying don't grow. I'm not saying reject all lessons. I'm not saying refuse to metabolize your experiences. Very often, we get stuck looping until we do metabolize the medicine. But the “gift” and the medicine can be one and the same, or perhaps the poison and the antidote.

I'm saying: you're allowed to hate how you learned what you learned. You're allowed to wish you could return the bouquet for a full refund. You're allowed to acknowledge the flowers are objectively beautiful and still want them gone from your house.

Growth that respects your sovereignty makes space for your actual response. Anything else is just trauma dressed up as transformation.

The Bouquet You Get to Choose

Here's what I want for the leaders I work with, for the gifted adults reading this, for anyone who's been told one too many times how beautiful their pain made them:

I want you to recognize the difference between bouquets that are delivered to your door and gardens you choose to plant yourself. Between manure that gets dumped at your driveway and compost you deliberately cultivate. Yes, you might eventually turn that unwanted delivery into fertilizer. You might sell it, even. You might build an entire business on your ability to metabolize what others dump on you and transform it into something valuable. I like to joke that I am the original patron saint of turning shit into sugar.

I had another unplanned delivery of, ahem, fertilizer this past week and turned it into my most creative week all year. But here's what matters: the fact that you can doesn't mean you have to be grateful for the original delivery. The fact that you're good at it doesn't mean you asked for it. The fact that it made you stronger doesn't mean the cost was acceptable.

These contain the same raw materials, can teach you the same things. But one is imposed and one is chosen, and your relationship to each is fundamentally different.

When you're ready to grow, when you're ready to transform, when you're ready to learn the next thing, you'll know. Not because someone told you the lesson was beautiful. Not because someone dumped it at your door. But because you chose to pick up the seeds—or the shovel—yourself.

Until then? Those bouquets life keeps delivering can stay right where they are. You don't owe them gratitude. You don't owe them a place in your home. You don't owe anyone admiration for an arrangement you never ordered.

You're allowed to see the flowers and still hate every single one. That's not refusal of growth. That's the beginning of choosing it for yourself.

Kate helps gifted, creative, and talented adults navigate leadership and transformation without spiritual bypassing or mandatory gratitude. Her work combines 15 years of executive coaching with trauma-informed practices that honor your actual response to your actual experience.