How to Get Through the Hard Stuff

Some unconventional thoughts about grit and why most advice about resilience sucks

Hello, Perseverers!

If we work hard enough, we can turn perseverers into a widely recognized word!

Today’s essay and the accompanying haiku comics were originally published behind the paywall on Medium last week. Some of you may have read it. But I wanted to publish it here without a paywall because I think it might be useful.

However, because this essay touches on some deeply personal facts about me, however lightly, I am paywalling off the comment section—this being the internet and all.

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How to Get Through the Hard Stuff

Grit is important. I get it — you get it — we all get it! But why does most advice about how to build grit suck?

Grit, sometimes known as resilience in more clinical places, is the ability to keep your life moving forward after setbacks. While it is a universal truth that no human life is without pain or problems, it often feels like so many people who choose to write about grit have never faced a setback in life that they didn’t have enough money to handle.

Better planning doesn’t solve poverty. Happy mantras don’t dispel years of abuse. Smiling won’t bring back loved ones who have passed on.

And while all pain is relative, the truth is that coming from a certain level of wealth protects you against the worst elements of the tragedies and traumas that most of us have to live through.

So much advice about resilience comes down to the simple lines from the wonderful children’s book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt:

We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
Oh no!
We’ve got to go through it!

Telling this to an adult as a way of saying you should have grit is a bit like telling someone who is drowning that their life would be better if they would just keep their head above the water.

You already know you have to go through this dark period. You need the strength to get back up and a reason to keep trying.

I don’t know what you’re going through. But I do know what I have gone through. At the risk of sounding like a contestant in the Trauma Olympics, here are a few of the challenges I’ve faced:

• Physical abuse at the hands of a parent

• Emotional abuse at the hands of a parent

• Religious trauma

• Cancer

• Mental health struggles

• Adult ADHD

• Loss of a career

• Financial collapse and bankruptcy

• Dealing with the welfare system

• Suicidal ideation

• Addiction in close family members

• Untimely deaths of parents and other family members

• Chronic illnesses in my children and spouse

I share these challenges not to boast or to generate pity. I want you to know that I have been through some shit. Many of these challenges have happened concurrently or in close succession.

Your life may be infinitely harder than what I have gone through.

I consider myself to be fortunate. I love my life, and while that has not always been the case, I do recognize that I have a lot of privilege because of my race, gender, and sexual identity.

Life is not a competition to see who has had it worse, but I also believe it’s easier to hear someone talk about grit who has suffered and who didn’t have a reservoir of cash to cushion the blow. At the darkest times in my life, I had to stay home and face things, not head off to three different countries on two continents to find myself again.

How do you find the strength to keep going while lying at the bottom of a ravine? How do you find a reason to keep moving forward when everything you know has been taken from you?

There is not one right answer. The exact recipe that will work for you will differ from what has worked for me. But, there are two things everyone who has to go through hard things must find. You must find small pockets of joy in your life, and you must find a way to name and face your emotions.

Small Pockets of Joy & Strength to Get Back Up

One of the great superpowers that every human has is the ability to see what they are looking for. If you set your mind to find small things that are good in your life, no matter how awful a state you are in, you will find them.

These small pockets of joy will not solve your problems or magically carry you through to the other side of your grief or trauma. However, these brief moments of gratitude or pockets of joy do act as small places of refuge as you work your way through your troubles. Think of them as tiny oases in the desert. You stop at one oasis to rest and replenish your supplies before heading out again, where you will look for another oasis where you can stop.

One of the ways I found small pockets of joy was by writing haiku about the world around me. I would take long walks and write small poems about what I saw. Other times, I would sit at a window and write haiku about what I noticed happening outside.

These short, three-line poems became my meditation. They turned into a mindfulness exercise.

Later, I would learn to go deeper with this practice by creating haiku comics. These short illustrations made me focus more intensely on simple daily events like sunsets and gave me something to look forward to.

Other people find this same kind of relief from the struggles of life through sketchbooks, traditional meditation, walks through the city or nature, and journaling.

The key is to notice what you notice.

During one particularly rough stretch for me and my family, I found daily joy in taking my children to school. I created a playlist for the car that had specific songs that each individual child loved. We sang and laughed as we drove to school, easing their anxiety about the new schools they were attending and filling me with a sense of happiness at seeing their temporary relief from the dread they were carrying around due to the circumstances of our lives.

I noticed that I found joy in trying to bring joy to my children. Over time, I came to understand part of my problem was my wallowing in my problems, and that part of the way out of the dilemma I was facing was to focus on helping others.

I stumbled upon an ancient notion that a good life was not based on wealth but on human connection. Searching for small joys became a habit and then a discipline that allowed me to let go of my painful past and release my expectations for the future. All that was left was to live in the present.

All of that transformation happened over a period of many years. But, at the moment, in the day-to-day of navigating poverty and difficult family dynamics, searching for small pockets of joy helped me survive one hour at a time on days when I wasn’t sure I could even take life one day at a time.

If life is overwhelming, stop trying to solve everything and just look for one tiny thing that makes you smile. That can be enough for right now. When you string enough of these small pockets of joy together, you find the strength to get back up after life has sucker punched you and left you in a heap by the side of the road.

Naming and Facing Emotions & Your Reasons to Keep Trying

You cannot reason your way out of grief, shame, or any of the other difficult human emotions that often trap us. The only way to get relief from these feelings is to name and face them.

You have to discover what it is you are feeling.

Because of my upbringing, I did not know how to identify hardly any of my feelings until well into middle age. This is still something I struggle with.

However, I am a master at suppressing uncomfortable feelings. At different times in my life, years of suppressed emotions have exploded out of me, leaving me bewildered and floundering.

For most of my life, I thought of myself as being pretty chill. I rarely ever got angry, and I didn’t hold grudges. Then I had the rugged pulled out from underneath me in my mid-thirties, and everything made me mad.

I knew I was filled with rage, but I had no idea what to do about it. I knew I didn’t want to yell at my kids the way my father had yelled at me. But sometimes, it felt like the rage just spilled out of me, often without any provocation.

That was when I started doing something that sounded crazy. On days when my rage felt all-consuming, I would get into my car, drive to Walmart, park in the far corner of the lot, and scream as loud as I could.

The first time I did this, I felt such relief that I cried for ten minutes.

Yelling in my car became something I did at least once a week, and this practice led to two surprising outcomes. One, it meant I never yelled anywhere else. I wasn’t traumatizing my children with my anger. Two, I started to yell about what I was feeling, and I discovered I was carrying anger and shame about things that had happened to me as a child that I had never dealt with. I had just taken those emotions and stuffed them as far down as possible.

I had never understood that I had felt shame, but with the help of therapy and my own study, I came to learn that my shame was what fueled my anger.

This discovery led me to go on a quest to learn more about how I express and feel different emotions. I had no idea that I experienced emotions in my body. I was in my thirties, had an advanced degree, and was still learning how basic human emotions work.

The more I practiced experiencing my emotions, even the negative ones, and identifying those emotions, the better regulated I became.

One thing I did to teach myself about my emotions was to create a document called, How to Become Indomitable, where I listed all of the things I did to experience emotions. I listed over 130 activities, including everything from crying and laughing to gardening and walking.

One of the great self-help lies is that if you are sad or discouraged, it is your fault for not thinking enough positive thoughts.

Life happens to all of us. Often, the greatest hurts we sustain are not our fault at all. However, how we deal with what has happened to us is our responsibility.

You do not need to blame yourself to change yourself.

Often, the emotions that feel too much to bear will never fully go away. When you grieve over the death of a loved one, that grief never leaves. It does, however, become more manageable once you submit to feeling that grief.

Understanding the difference between blame and responsibility is empowering. Just like it is not your fault that someone rear-ends you, it is still your responsibility to deal with the insurance fallout and to get your car repaired.

The same is true for anything that happens to you in life. You don’t need to feel guilt or shame over what happened to take responsibility for identifying and feeling your feelings.

When a wound is fresh, figuring out what you feel may seem impossible. The good news is that you don’t need to sort it all out right now. What you need to do is find a way to get to tomorrow.

Some days, this might mean distracting yourself. It might mean creating something ridiculous to look forward to.

On my worst days, I would promise myself that if I got through today, I would treat myself to a $1 soda at McDonald’s for lunch the next day. I would take my homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwich, go through the drive-thru, order a Large $1 Coke (what I called the “greatest deal in America”), and then feel like a king eating my meager lunch in my car.

Rebuilding your life doesn’t mean living a life worthy of a Hollywood Oscar-bait film. Grit just means finding a way to get through today, the next hour, or even the next five minutes.

Life is built of moments. When you are going through the hardest times, the fact that you are willing to look for joy and name your emotions means you have grit.

Grit isn’t glamorous. Grit often looks like breaking down. It can be screaming in your car, sobbing yourself to sleep, and it can mean cooking breakfast for dinner.

But the fact that you survive to see another day means you are in the process of “going through it.”

The only path through the hard parts of life is time. Whatever you need to do to buy yourself more time is grit.

Thanks for reading!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,