Life & Wisdom Quote by Gail Sheehy

Sheehy doesn’t flatter hardship; she domesticates it. “To be tested is good” reads like a deliberately bracing antidote to a culture that treats comfort as a birthright and struggle as a glitch. The line is clipped, almost stoic, but it’s not macho. It’s pragmatic: testing is framed as evidence that you’re in motion, not stuck in a waiting room of self-improvement.

The second sentence does the sly work. “The challenged life may be the best therapist” turns therapy from a clinic into a lived condition. Sheehy borrows the language of self-help and mental health, then reroutes it: the real counselor isn’t an expert with a clipboard, it’s the sequence of demands you didn’t schedule. That “may” matters; it keeps her from sounding like a bootstrap scold. She’s leaving room for suffering that crushes rather than clarifies, while still arguing that challenge is often the engine of insight.

Contextually, this is classic Sheehy: a writer who made a career out of mapping life stages, reinvention, and the messy middle of adulthood. The subtext is a rebuke to passivity. If life is the therapist, you can’t outsource your growth to a session or a book; you have to meet the assignment as it arrives. It works because it offers consolation without sentimentality: you’re not broken for being challenged. You’re being worked on.