Do You Deal With The Difficulty Delusion?

“Everything is hard, but you choose your hard. You choose what’s worth it. You don’t choose whether or not you’ll suffer, but you do choose what you want to suffer for.”

― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

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We hear people around us saying things like:

I’d start my own business, but it’s hard.

I’d go back to school and get that degree, but it’s hard.

I’d learn a new language, but it’s so hard.

I’d start exercising regularly, but it’s hard.

I’d leave this relationship with someone who doesn’t respect me, but it’s hard.

I’d have another child, but it’s hard.

I’d change jobs, but it’s hard.

I’d go to therapy, but it’s so hard.

I’d volunteer and give back to my community, but it’s hard.

I have said this many times too, that it’s hard. Though, perhaps not as many times as people around me. I was rather stuck in the other extreme, as I was raised by my parents to be fierce and to know I could do it all, even if that meant sacrificing myself first.

This extreme is also not the best place to be. That’s why I have embarked on a journey of rediscovery and shedding off limiting beliefs that didn’t serve me anymore. I started to complain a bit more, not excessively, but only to balance out my need to prove myself to everyone that I could do it all, without complaining. So, in my case, I can do it all a little less and complain a bit more. I need to avoid falling into the other extreme!

To repair relationships, to give up relationships, to stay calm, to leave, to return, to work from home, to go back to the office, to learn a language, to part with my mother when I leave or she leaves, to cook three times a day. Hard, hard, HARD. We hear it everywhere.

Every time I post something about parenting travels with kids, therapy, or self-care, I receive hundreds of messages where people tell me that what I do sounds amazing, but hard, almost superhuman.

Listen to me, please. I’m an expert in hard, because my whole life I have been writing about it somewhere, usually in hiding while I was growing up. My only place where I could complain freely was my diary.

Still, we all are experts in hard. It’s all hard, anyway. It’s not possible to be alive and for it to be easy. Life comes with loss, pain, longing, giving up, effort, problems, and so much more. It’s overwhelming, or yes.. hard.

All lives are like this, always.

If you have people in your lives who seem to have everything easy, it’s not true. They surely have hard times, too. It’s not just hard to leave; it’s also hard to stay.

Many times in life, we don’t do something because we’re afraid of the difficulty of change. Humans are wired to resist change because our brains interpret change as a threat, triggering the fight-or-flight response.

Ironically, very often, it’s harder to do nothing! We just don’t realize it because we don’t know what it’s like to do something, and we don’t find out because we’re afraid of the difficulty.

Why do I think it’s like this?

Where does this fear of difficulty come from?

Maybe because we grew up in denial, with fear of change and failure, we didn’t see this relaxation in our parents: well, it’s going to be hard, but we’ll manage. We have solutions. Let’s try. In the worst case, we’ll go back to where we started.

My parents also grew up being afraid of change but knowing deep down in their hearts and minds that it was necessary. They were yearning for change, for a better life, which was only possible if my dad went to work abroad. They did their best to dive right into it, though they said it was quite late in their lives. Forever feeling like they had somehow lost something, they wished they had done it earlier.

Still, why do we find things difficult? Is it overthinking?

Maybe because we don’t know how to sit with what we feel, we usually chase away difficult emotions far away. What we ignore is that living with parts of ourselves buried is also hard, because we don’t trust that we can manage.

Parents didn’t know how to give us this, school didn’t do much to help us. We don’t feel we’ll be supported, because we don’t really know how to ask for help or how to receive it.

My life lesson says that it’s hard anyway, but that most of the time, if you move, if you try, always look for solutions; if you venture out, the difficulty is also interesting; it’s always different, and, moreover, it grows you.

If you choose the difficulty of standing still, you’re just deluding yourself that you’re staying safe.

You don’t grow, you don’t discover yourself.

For me, difficulty is just another challenge. One that I accept or not. I don’t jump into anything. I think carefully. But if it’s just the fear of difficulty that holds me back, I don’t pay attention to it. I listen to it and let it exist, but I make my plan without it.

I try to show this to our children, too. I always tell them: Yes, okay, we have this problem. It sucks, but wait a minute. Let’s breathe and think. What would help us? What solutions might there be? Where do we look for them? Who do we ask? It’s so important to raise them brave and resilient!

Life is an interesting journey, and it is different every day.

You climb, you descend, and you come across rivers that need to be crossed.

You’ll be afraid and cold, but hey, you’re not alone on the road.

And you have a backpack full of resources behind you.

You just have to look there. You’ll succeed, then it will be good and easy again until the next crossroads. And so on.

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***I originally published this article on Medium