No retreat, no resolution

It’s been quiet on this side of the newsletter; I apologise. It’s been a few months of travelling, dealing with writer’s block, understanding grief, and redefining my relationship with hardship. Whenever I think I’ve found my stride, life brings me new lessons.

As the year comes to a new start, fresh resolutions and fresh goals will be resurrected and chased. These past few years have made me certain that most people will aim for ease from hardship and suffering moving away from one chaos or another. I have no intention of drafting a resolution, instead, I’d like to start this year with a conversation about hardship and seeing beyond the immediate discomfort that complicates life.

I’ve always struggled with handling difficult situations. I get easily overwhelmed and find it difficult to ask for help only to later feel like a failure at not being able to exist “functionally.”  This trait has been especially unfavourable in times were struggling has become unthinkable in our society. We are slowly being coaxed away from understanding and having a relationship with struggle and hardship in a productive way, media and the conversations about ease further disillusion us. Ease is also a necessity in times like these when it looks like all we have is a bleak reality filled with confusion and crushing expectations. The pendulum seems to swing to the extremes leaving no room for moderation.

For most of us, hardships and struggles are compulsory to get to where we need to get and accomplish the goals we’ve set for ourselves. This retreat from hardship was a limited perspective I was participating in that enabled further hardships. The rise of certain movements on social media added to these delusions of wanting to live a life with little to no hardship, even though most of us are not the demographic afforded this opulence and ease. Did it mean we just endure in silence? To any subscribers of this “soft life,” please do not feel called out, we’re all just victims of the great paradoxes of life that sometimes demand that “if we truly want to improve ourselves and the lives of others, we must embrace discomfort,” it’s just sad to see how we’ve gotten lost in the extremes.

There’s still so much to learn but for the first time, I can humbly accept and understand struggle and hardship as a necessary part of the life I intend to live. It sounds silly to admit, but this simple realisation has done some good for my overall mental health. The upside of a long year filled with many failures was:

relinquishing control and knowing the limits to the control I have in my life,

developing deeper compassion and humility towards life,

seeing how my decision-making skills have strengthened significantly,

learning how to advocate for myself and understand my needs more than ever before,

most importantly, identifying that being afraid or ashamed of failures diminishes the lessons I’m meant to learn. With all the bad, comes some good that presents me with the opportunity to adapt and enhance my flexibility.

So, I will not retreat from hardship if it presents itself anymore, nor will I make resolutions for ease this new year. Not because I don’t deserve ease but because hardship and suffering have consistently been a catalyst for the drastic changes in my life. I’ll open myself to handling things better emotionally and mentally, trusting that even in the chaos, there’s a plan, even if I can’t see it.

If you’re like me and currently feel like you don’t have the energy for the new beginning before us after a year (or two) of hardships and struggles, no resolution is needed, showing up is enough for now.