Looking for love in all the right places

​For the past few weeks, I have felt like a cartoon character walking around with a dark rain cloud moving above me. No matter where I turned, the hits just kept coming. Have you ever had a week or weeks like that? Someone once told me that you could not appreciate joy if you never felt pain or love if you have never felt anger. I can honestly say I feel both love and joy deeply. Suffice it to say, words like surgery- failed, pain, flood, and death are just a few of the words that have impacted me recently. My family is waiting for me to break, cry, and let it all go, but I find myself laughing at the absurdity of being hit from all sides.
Sayings like "god only give you what you can handle" and "it's just a blip on the radar of your life' are what I have been grappling with. I even have gone down that road looking for people who have had it worse than I did to put things into perspective.
But I am still sad, frustrated, and irritated.
Yet, I believe that with every negative, there is a lesson, a moment of gratitude that could not be achieved if you were not faced with trauma. 
The problem was that it all seemed pretty grim no matter where I looked. So what do you do when searching for gratitude in the middle of a storm?