#71: Give yourself some credit.

Remembering what we’ve already survived when faced with a difficult time.

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“So, bro, what do you do when you are in a trough?” I asked.

“I tell myself, ‘This will come to an end, it will not last forever,’ ” was Richie’s response.

We were discussing the troughs of life — the times when things are especially difficult for one reason or another. Since last week’s post, I’ve become mildly obsessed with these periods. Not just my go-to of grief, but any and all moments when the sine curve of life dips below the zero line and everything just gets hard. And yet, over and over again most of us find the strength and motivation to move forward. How?

A few days later, Sonya and I were headed home from a book talk in DC when I popped the same question to her. 

“I think about the hardest thing I have ever done, and compare it to the current situation. Then I can usually tell myself, ‘I’ve done harder things than what’s in front of me right now, and survived. I’ll make it through.’ ” 

Then she turned the question on me. 

I answered, “Well, this sounds kind of dark, but you’ll understand. I always say to myself, ‘Nobody died.’ ”

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After several days of rolling these answers around like rocks in the tumbler of my mind, it dawned on me.

While Richie’s, Sonya’s, and my words varied, these three “trough” strategies were fundamentally the same. They all reflect our experience, our history of surviving. Over and over and over again. 

As a fellow member of the human race, I don’t love reliving the slow-motion train wrecks of my hardest moments. Even while writing The Luminist, I rarely bring up the vivid images of the day my world crumbled. Instead, I prefer to conjure the moments when the clouds finally parted and we found ourselves in warm sunlight, touching baby leaves, laughing about squeegees. In general, when I walk down the halls of my memory, I’m looking for the good times. Smiles everyone, smiles! 

Shoutout to those Fantasy Island viewers of the early 80’s — including me and my dad!

I, like most people, assume that revisiting painful memories just causes more pain.

So why go there?

Here’s why: these memories are eye-witness evidence of our ability to survive.

The point is not to remember how godawful that moment was, and end up crying on the couch for the rest of the day. The point is to face the reality that there was a moment in our past when we thought we couldn’t go on… and yet we did. Personally, I have survived a real double-digit humdinger of a list, with Mike’s death on the first line. And comparing that side-by-side with whatever I’m currently going through (a crisis of creative confidence, for example) makes me laugh. I’m going to be just fine.

So along with all the other kinds of lists we humans love to scribble down (bucket lists, gratitude lists, Christmas lists!), I'm compiling my toughest moments, standing back in awe, then patting myself vigorously on the back for making it through.

These moments I would rather forget are where my power lies.

I’m not sure if I believe the old refrain, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”… but knowing I’ve survived worse, and this too shall pass, definitely boosts my confidence.

On the flip side, ignoring the existence of troughs, past or present, builds a brittleness around the hard times of life. I don’t want to break that easily. 

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The way that we meet and travel through our troughs defines our lives.

The peaks are easy, no one has to teach us how to ride the waves of joy and contentment. So the biggest impact we can have on our lives is by adjusting the way that we manage the inevitable hard times that come in between. In this life, pain is inevitable. Time to heal and regroup is required. But building resilience to relate to that pain and healing is the game-changer.

We’ve talked in previous posts about how to upgrade our trough mindset — I will survive this, things will be great again, “failure” is just an experiment I learned from, etc. Zooming out however, I don’t think we need another strategy as much as we need to remember that humans are made to heal, that we’ve done it before, and that we can do it again.

This is the opposite of arrogance. It is learning from history.

Despite my strategy skepticism, I’ll almost definitely write about more trough strategies in the future. I can’t help myself. I love feeling like I have an action plan, I’m in control, I can make a change. But I’m realizing that my beloved strategies on some level might be security blankets — a way to wrap myself in a sense of agency while waiting for the trough to roll over me, pass through me, and then leave.

I’m not going to tell you that time heals all wounds. But a wave of grief, a stressful deadline crunch at work, a writing block will almost certainly not last forever. Especially when we believe in its end, and our ability to make it there.

At the end of a seven-hour hike!

With confidence,

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