Toughness Is Earned - Easy Life Leads to Hard Times
Toughness Is Earned - Easy Life Leads to Hard Times
If you had a tough time growing up or had survived challenging periods, you have grown stronger than you think. Others would crumble at what you call a lazy Tuesday.
While no one would choose to live a tough life, many of us do. Going through these dark periods is anything but pleasant, but in the end, they can help us navigate life's numerous challenges.
Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:
If you have been dirt poor for years and somehow managed to survive while maintaining a smile, you will deal with financial calamities much easier than those who know only comfort, safety, and abundance. Anything that reduces their stability and perceived security will crush them.
If you have changed many jobs and have been through the ups and downs of accompanying intense emotional swings, you will be toughened up. When such a thing happens to someone who's never experienced losing a job, they will feel that their whole world is being burned to the ground.
If you've experienced multiple breakups, painful though they may be, you will have learned that they are not the end of the world. Eventually, you get back up on the proverbial horse and find happiness either in being single or in a new relationship. For someone who has only ever been with one person, breaking up with them is the end of all they know. It will devastate them, and many will never recover from it.
If you have experienced bullying and lived in a violent setting, either from your peers, fighting on the streets, or the front, your tolerance for violence and the threat to your safety will be incomparable to those of regular people who have been spared your pain. You've learned to deal with this threat and the reality of your fragility, strengths and weaknesses, and, in extreme cases, mortality. When a violent confrontation or life-threatening situation occurs, you will handle it incomparably easier than someone who knows nothing of such a life.
The above-mentioned examples are external—the obvious things we all know and accept. But there's an even more critical aspect of toughness—mental toughness and the ability to handle fear, rejection, depressive thoughts, stress, anxiety, loneliness, and even sorrow. You don't think of these things as your strengths, but they can be a superpower in the most mundane of life's situations.
One such example is parenting
Parenting is a drastic change to anyone's lifestyle. While infinitely beautiful, it comes with many challenges:
Worrying and caring for an innocent, fragile little being who is utterly dependent on you.
Fractures in the relationship with your partner.
Immense fear, anxiety, and stress that come with being a parent.
If you've been spoiled rotten your whole life, living comfortably without any proper setbacks, stress, failure, and, most importantly, mental distress, it will shock you and throw you into disarray. The first sign of trouble and hardship, and you will crumble under the weight of it all.
Parenting could be a horrible experience for you because you will be drowning in the problems without the ability to mentally handle them and refocus on the good despite the bad.
You will feel terrified like never before, and if you don't know how to handle fear and anxiety, it will consume you.
You will feel overworked, overburdened, and physically exhausted. If you don't know how to save your strength, take it one day at a time and look toward the light at the end of the tunnel, it may crush you under its weight.
You will have to take responsibility for someone who cannot care for themselves without an exit or pause. It is a privilege, but it is also a burden. If you've never cared for others and don't know what it feels like for a living being to be entirely dependent on you, regardless of your mood or energy, it can be overwhelming. You might feel like you're suffocating, trapped in service.
You will have to deal with disease, doctors, unpredictable situations, arguments, failure, not knowing what to do, rejection, and a sense of never being good enough. If you're not used to the fact that life is inherently uncertain, it will be a horrible realization with terrifying consequences.
You will deal with things out of your control, upon which you desperately want to exert your influence but will be unable to. If you haven't learned to manage stress by separating things that are under your control from things that aren't, you're going to drive yourself insane trying to prevent or force things beyond your power.
Most importantly, if you hadn't had to deal with extremely unpleasant thoughts and emotions, the ups and downs of parenthood might be a wild rollercoaster ride. Parenting can push us to extremes. Extreme fear, anxiety, and confusion, combined with physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, can lead you to dark places.
I always say you don't know fear until you are afraid for your children. You don't know the meaning of exhaustion until you've spent a few weeks with a broken sleep schedule.
Being a parent also presents you with a mirror
You will get to know who you are intimately and won't always like what you see. If you have never done self-analysis, don't know how to organize your thoughts, accept who you are, and overcome obstacles, the landing might not be soft.
All the challenges, failures, and struggles in our lives prepare us for more of the same. Like tearing up muscles and learning to fight by first learning to fall, you build up resistance to physical, mental, and emotional challenges that prepare you for things to come.
No, it's not an enjoyable process, and none of us would have chosen to have gone through them had they had a say in it, but they are a part of who we are today.
A hard early life might lead to an easier later life, and a soft early life might lead to a hard life later on.
None of us can choose our past
All the things that can make us stronger also leave scars. Physical, mental, and emotional. Some can benefit us in the future, and some can make life even harder. Accept your life and who you have become as a result, and make the best of it.
One day, you might realize that all that darkness and pain you went through now enables you to navigate life's challenges easier than others who have lived softer lives.
Maybe, just maybe, that would be a good time to forgive yourself and everyone who might have been a part of that painful story. With a twist of fate, those horrible experiences might have been exactly what you need to handle what life has in store for you. And just like that, what once was darkness and weakness now becomes the light and strength.
Guess what? You get to choose the label you assign to past events. Why not re-frame them into something positive? Turn your dark past into your super ability.
Aren't all heroes, super or otherwise, born of hellish beginnings? Why do you think that is?
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