Or Just Learning How to Rest on Grass That Still Itches
Sometimes the dynamics of life arrive not as a path, but as a series of collisions. Something breaks, shifts, disappears, or turns against the shape of who you thought you were. And because survival rarely waits for readiness, you learn quickly how to turn damage into utility.
We are told to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives us. But some lemons are too bitter, too sharp, too misplaced to belong anywhere. So, you learn something subtler than optimism: if sweetness is impossible, extract zest. If healing is delayed, produce function. If nothing fits, make use of what wounds you.
At first, this feels like resilience. Later, it becomes identity.
Over time, crisis stops being an interruption and becomes a habitat. You no longer respond to intensity; you metabolize it. You become fluent in urgency, efficient in uncertainty, strangely calm in disorder. There is no official term for this transformation, so I made one: crisovore.
A crisovore is someone who has learned to feed on crisis.
Not because they enjoy suffering, but because disruption became the environment in which their strengths were formed. Some people grow in gardens. Others learn in storms.
I had to scratch myself out of crisis at almost every stage of my life. I lost my father and learned that the worst fear can, in fact, become reality—and life continues anyway. I was betrayed by people I trusted and discovered that disappointment can clarify character faster than affection ever does. When I entered professional life, a pandemic began. And in a strange paradox, that global rupture created opportunities for growth within my field.
Whether internal or external, personal or collective, crisis seemed to arrive with consistency. Enough times, and you begin to wonder: am I finding crisis, or has crisis found me? Do I endure it because I can, or have I simply built myself around expecting it?
We often celebrate what hardship teaches us. Discipline. Perspective. Endurance. Adaptation. And those lessons are real. But there is a quieter consequence people rarely discuss: what happens when crisis becomes familiar enough to feel necessary?
Because familiarity has its own gravity.
Intensity begins to resemble meaning. Urgency feels like direction. Constant problem-solving mimics purpose. You wake up alert, needed, mobilized. Every day asks something of you, and in answering it, you feel alive.
Then one day, life softens.
Nothing is collapsing. No emergency needs containing. No immediate threat is sharpening your attention. The phone is quiet. The room is still. And instead of relief, you feel unease.
Calm, for the unpracticed, can feel unnatural.
Peace does not always arrive as comfort. Sometimes it arrives as emptiness. Sometimes it feels like a waiting room before the next disaster. Sometimes it is mistaken for stagnation simply because it lacks adrenaline.
What does one do when life finally feels safe, but something inside does not trust safety? How do you distinguish between what is healthy and what is merely less stimulating? What happens when you feel tempted to recreate chaos, not because you want pain, but because pain is recognizable and calm is not?
Living through crisis can resemble addiction—not in spectacle, but in rhythm. Like caffeine, it sharpens perception and lends momentum. It gives structure to the day. Its absence can feel less like peace and more like withdrawal: a low ache, a restlessness without object, a sense that something important has gone missing.
Not the crisis itself, but the intensity.
We speak often about rebuilding after hardship. We speak less about remaining present when nothing is broken. Yet perhaps this is the more difficult task.
Crisis demands reaction. Calm demands tolerance.
Crisis tells you what to do next. Calm asks whether you know who you are without instructions.
Crisis can make you feel chosen, central, necessary. Calm asks whether existence needs drama to feel valid.
So perhaps the real question is not whether we can survive crisis. Many of us already know that we can.
The real question is whether we can live without organizing our inner world around it. Whether intensity can become an experience rather than a dependency. Whether peace can be learned with the same seriousness with which survival once was.
Maybe there is no final balance, no permanent arrival. Maybe life is only this ongoing negotiation between two selves: the one trained by disruption, and the one still learning how to stay when nothing is on fire.
Perhaps growth, for some of us, is not learning to survive the lava, but learning to rest on the grass. And who ever said the grass would not trigger an allergy of its own?
Artwork: Carola i soffan, Gustaf Cederström
Between Everywhere and Nowhere 
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