You’re Already Doing Hard Things

Many years ago, as a young teacher and mother, I listened to a parent describe her experience raising babies eleven months apart.

“I don’t remember anything from the first two years really,” she said. “It’s all a fog.”

It seemed rude to show my abject horror. My husband and I were considering a second child at that point, but this conversation was making my ovaries contract. I swallowed. “How in the world did you get through it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You don’t have time to think about how hard it is. You just do it.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of that since.

You know Glennon Doyle’s catchphrase, right? It’s on candles and keychains everywhere fine Etsy products are sold, and it’s also the title of her podcast: We Can Do Hard Things.

It’s a great one, as catchphrases go. It’s snappy! It’s encouraging! It has its own built-in rebuttal! It orients us toward a future in which we are competent and brave and buoyed by the collective we. I like it.

But as I listened to We Can Do Hard Things this week, I remembered that I also like the version my therapist uses. Hers points in the opposite direction. Not toward someday. The other way–the direction that parent was gesturing toward, in the opaque, childrearing ruin of her long-term memory.

“You’re already doing hard things,” my therapist likes to tell me. Over and over and over.

See, if left unchecked, my thoughts trend toward unliveable futures. Not just of the supervolcano sort, but also of the it’s-the-everyday-living-that-kills-you sort. I imagine myself frayed and defeated by global famine AND my children getting their first cell phones. Or by me caring for aging parents during a zombie apocalypse. Or just, you know, the dog dying.

I imagine all the things, all the time, will be too hard.

So when my therapist swoops in, she wants me to remember that a few years ago, the things I’m deftly handling now fell into the future apocalypse category, too. Parenting. Writing. Sharing my writing. Not teaching. Turning forty.

At some time in my life—probably while lying in a dark bedroom staring at the ceiling—I’ve seen all of these inscribed on my tombstone. Here lies Lisa. Killed by the human condition.

And you know what? All of those things have been hard. I wasn’t wrong about their difficulty; I was just wrong about whether I could navigate them and remain among the living.

That’s a universal human tendency, though. When we make calculations about the future, everybody leaves out their own resilience. 

The truth is that we have something called “psychological immunity”—positive emotions that will come in to replace the negative ones, healthy self-talk, support systems, coping strategies. We can’t remember it when we’re doomthinking, but psychological immunity will be there to brush the hard thing bootprint off your back when you need it.

More good news is that you have no idea what will make you happy or sad or dead inside or whatever. For a million reasons, including every bias our brains possess, we can’t predict our future states. There are entire books about it. And if you read them, you’ll still have no idea how you’ll feel a year from now. Might as well take a little pressure off and assume it will be great.

I have some phantom hard things on the horizon that I keep telling my therapist I simply cannot do. This week, like many weeks, she brought out the receipts. “Hold on,” she said, flipping several pages back in what I imagine is the largest and most repetitive set of notes she’s ever taken. “Let’s look at what else you said you couldn’t handle.”

If you are also envisioning a few Calamity Ganons in your five-year plan, may I suggest that you do the same? I know it’s hard to step outside the whirring catastrophe reel of your mind, and it’s even harder to give yourself credit for anything, but so are all the other things you’re already doing.

What’s one more hard thing?