Grateful for Bothersome Things?

 Can we be grateful for things that challenge our comfort zones and "bother us"? I am hesitant here to use the word "grateful", for fear that it entails a forced sense of joy. I think gratitude might be used to mean a sense of seeing meaning in bothersome things rather than going to a place of dislike/like. If I can see pain as meaningful in some ways, I am already close to opening up to it in some way. But that also means being open to the complex emotions I might feel in that space of meaning: neither total like nor dislike, nor total openness or closedness. In the space of meeting that "thing", whatever bothers us, there is actually a transcending of halves and binaries.
  The problem is that this experience I am edging toward has no opposites, so there is no language to really describe it. Language can render some of this irritable contact "comprehensible", but language also obscures the rawness of that contact. It fails to capture the vulnerability of being with others. Even when I use the word "bothersome", I am entailing a kind of stance toward it--a contracting back or inward--and this obscures the pain of vulnerability to the other. The mind seems to be beyond these binaries. Perhaps this is where bothersome can become thankful, because anything that awakens one to the wholeness of mind is surely of benefit.