Can You Live Without The Struggle?
I like pain. It’s an inexplicable part of my personality. For example, I like the actual pain of getting a tattoo. I find it cathartic. It focuses me and helps my understand that pain is fleeting, temporary and often not as bad as we feel it is.
This affinity for pain extends much further than tiny needles drilling ink into the layers of my skin.
I enjoy making tough decisions, doing difficult things, living a slightly more complex life than would be considered normal and walking on a somewhat less trodden path. I don’t know why this is. My psychologist says it’s because I am addicted to anxiety and I’m starting to believe him.
Here’s what happens in my day to day or week to week life:
A choice needs to be made.
I weigh up the options and invariably decide to go for the bigger, badder, riskier decision.
This leads to anxiety, “hustle” and the need to work myself into a frenzy.
This invariably leads to what I call “The Struggle”.
Sound familiar?
Let’s Talk About The Struggle
When I use the word struggle, I don’t mean physically struggling to get out of something or battling with something tangible that comes to an end, like a bar fight or argument with a significant other.
In my life, The Struggle is a dark monster that lives inside of me.
It claws its way from deep inside of me to challenge every thought, every decision and every move that I make. I am constantly battling with The Struggle to allow me to take a slightly easier path or have a slightly happier outlook on life.
The Struggle doesn’t want that.
The Struggle wants me to feel shit, it wants me to sleep less, worry more, suffer through every day and tell the world about how hard I am grinding and hustling to make my dreams come true. The Struggle thrives on suffering and letting everyone know how much I am struggling. The Struggle wears suffering like a badge of honour.
The Struggle was my friend early in my career but it has become a mortal enemy of mine as I have grown older and gained more experience.
The Struggle likes to trick you into thinking that the more you suffer, the more pain you can endure and the more you can tell people about your crazy nights, early mornings, insane work hours and ridiculously busy schedule, the more successful you are (or at least will appear to be).
The Struggle is real.
But it doesn’t have to be. This struggle, the one where you have to work yourself unhappily into a frenzy before you feel good enough to exist, is bullshit.
It’s OK to work hard sometimes. It’s OK to spend more time at the office than at home. It’s OK to be insanely ambitious and it’s OK to make the odd choice that others may not have made. All of this is OK as long as you are choosing it. Often The Struggle sneaks up on you. Often it is ingested by proximity to other Strugglers who need to pull you in and beat you with experience at being “busy” and “crazy” at work. Often The Struggle is just what you are exposed to so you think it’s the norm. Mostly, The Struggle isn’t often a proactive choice but a passive reaction to the world around us.
If you like working hard and your ambition outweighs your need to go drinking with your friends or hang out with your partner and kids, then that’s OK too. As long as you are honest about which struggle you are battling with and choosing.
You don’t have to struggle. You can always just choose a different path, balance things out a bit more, slow down, get a new job, leave your partner and struggle less.
Yes, it is okay to struggle less.
Photo by christopher lemercier on Unsplash