The struggle is real-ly important
I’ve done the homework of more than one boyfriend. What a hero I was. Rather than standing by as my stressed lovers missed their deadlines, I stepped up. I put my own work aside, taught myself the basics of architecture and later health, fields I knew nothing about, so that I could help them complete their assignments. What would these helpless procrastinators have done without me to swoop in and save the day? Um, they would have learnt not to procrastinate, the importance of organisation, or maybe they would have grown their confidence after completing the assignment on their own… How helpful of me to meddle in their lives, robbing them of the opportunities to learn and grow.
The only thing I was helping was my own discomfort. It’s not easy to witness someone close to you in the thick of their own struggle. Rather than trusting that the struggle was normal or that they had what it took to fall down and get back up, instead I panicked. I wanted to end the discomfort for them and therefore me. On both occasions, in lieu of the feel good act-of-kindness sensation, I realised I had done the wrong thing. I immediately vowed not to interfere again and let them be big boys. Not only did I dislike myself for being such a meddler, I respected them less for stepping backwards in their maturity. It was an all-round yucky experience, that I only did once, on two occasions.
We all know that you have to crawl before you can walk. It’s in the crawling that we strengthen our muscles, by making mistakes we learn about movement and gravity, testing the ideas needed in order to walk. Discomfort is not something that happens to the unlucky few, it’s an essential part of everyone’s life. It’s part of our personal evolution. But we don’t recongise the struggle for what it is. It’s like we’re looking for the path thinking ‘this isn’t right look at all the discomfort blocking the way’. But the discomfort is the way, the blessing not the curse. The problem is that our lives are so easy they’ve it made us fucking fragile. We have no tolerance for discomfort because we’ve never tasted it.
In our face-tuned, temperature controlled lives, with everything is just a click away - discomfort feels wrong. It’s the blemish we want to smooth out, the channel we want to change, the person we want to un-follow. But the more we avoid and the longer we procrastinate the struggle, the more fragile we become. The more fragile we become the more horrific the struggle feels. This is why the most gnarly productive people in the world walk on coals, plunge in freezing water, get up 5am, workout like lunatics, force gratitude practices when they feel like shit and other self-imposed discomfort practices. They get it. If you want to be strong, you have to invite struggle into your life. Invite struggle into your life in small ways to desensatise yourself and grow your tolerance, and in big ways to become your most bad-ass self.
Trust the struggle, trust yourself.
- Buzzzzy x