Either #feeblife is the wrong kind of hard, or I haven’t cracked the code yet.

The hard times in my past just seemed a little more…I don’t know…rewarding?

Like when I mucked through my history in therapy. That felt like digging up a dead body with a spoon in a storm over five excruciating years. But slowly, I made peace with all of it. Including myself.

Or when it turned out I was an absolutely miserable employee, which made me pretty sure I was just bad at everything. After 18 months of terror and nervous breakdowns in the bathroom, I bailed on the traditional path (gulp) only to surprise myself by shining as a solopreneur.

There was letting my Gram go, the heartbreaking home death she wanted and the 10 harrowing, glacial, and precious days that took to unfold.

In the moment, it all sucked.
In the end, it sucked for a reason.

Those things are the right kind of hard.

And then there’s the wrong kind of hard.

When I got assaulted, repeatedly, daily, why. That will never have a point.

Growing up, never understanding why people were nice but ultimately unwelcoming (BECAUSE YOU AREN’T MORMON AND NOTHING ELSE MATTERS IN AN ALL-MORMON TOWN, I want to scream at my younger self. IT’S NOT YOU AND YOU CAN’T FIX IT.)

When people died too young for stupid reasons and it broke the people around me…permanently. You can’t make it make sense.

The wrong kind of hard sucks for no reason.
Or at least, I don’t know what the reason is, yet.

I can be grateful to any hard experience for growing me as a person—in patience, in empathy, in wisdom, in humor, in grit, in openness, in grace. You either grow or you wind up bitter, and honestly, I think sometimes you have to get bitter for awhile before you get bored and grow instead.

But that doesn’t make it a GOOD hard.

Most days, I fight with the medical establishment for the dumbest of things and the most incremental of progress on any front.

I give half my meager earnings, a hefty chunk of my parents’ money, a ton of guilt and most of my time to care that barely keeps me afloat, sometimes makes me worse, and often winds up not doing anything at all.

Twice a day, I make each meal I still can eat, the same two meals I’ve now eaten for 2.5 years. Every day. It’s time consuming and boring. I feed myself like a dog. I don’t invite others to my boring table. I stifle my own kitchen creativity.

Honestly, I stifle all of it. My own sense of productivity, which has no correlation to pacing. My desire to clean. To create. My thirst, which often leads me to drink so much water my electrolytes go haywire. That crawling sense of cabin fever. My desires to dance (with mixed success…so many flares were brought to you by irrepressible bad white lady dancing). Anything I ever want to eat.

For what? So I can deny myself the very basics of being alive? I do not want a monklike aversion to basic bodily needs—water, movement, purpose.

It is not shaping me into something I want to become, and maybe that’s the difference.

The right kind of hard pushes me to only be more myself. The wrong kind pushes my real self away. Sometimes, the right kind of hard comes after spending way too long in the wrong kind.

I didn’t want to be a half-hearted half-person whose poorly-buried past kept clutching at her ankles and tripping her up, so I had to go therapy. I couldn’t make myself be a good employee, so I had do something else. And I loved my Gram; I couldn’t say that and not honor her wishes, hard as they were.

The wrong kind of hard usually ends when I sack up and heave myself over to the right kind. Like, when I gathered up all my eighth-grade chutzpah to finally report the assault, and it ended. Or post-Mormonville, when I skittishly prioritized making friends even when the lessons of rejection were baked into my bones. When I finally grieved the deaths I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve before, back when everyone else’s anguish seemed more valid.

I haven’t figured out how to shift this particular brand of hard, though.

What about it pushes me to be someone I’m not? (Nearly everything.) What can I do to move closer to who I am?

I don’t know. There are so many hard and worthwhile things I wanted to tackle in this lifetime, and these sickie struggles aren’t them.

These are stupid, frustrating, pitiful little problems, piled up into a miasma of impossibility.

But these are the problems I have.
Ones that don’t have a reason, and don’t have an end.

I don’t know if I can crack this one. But I don’t think I knew in the other hard times, either. Everything felt hopeless until it didn’t, in any hard time before.

There’s a better kind of hard, somewhere around here.

Any guesses on where it is?