We Can Do Hard Things

One

Why am I like this?

I am a great mystery to me. Understanding why I do the things I do is important to me because the things I do affect the people I love. So I don’t want to live on autopilot. I want to choose carefully which patterns to pass on. I want to break cycles. I want to live with freedom and agency and intentionality. This means I have to look under my own hood and tinker with and examine my programming.

Responsible adulthood is being both the engine and the mechanic.

I’m the mystery and the detective.

Tricky.

Glennon

As soon as we’re born, we enter into cultural and familial systems that say: You cannot trust your appetite. You cannot trust your desire. You cannot trust yourself. Since you cannot trust yourself, here’s a list of rules for you to follow instead.

So we lost vital parts of ourselves. We had to lose those parts of ourselves to survive in families, institutions, and societies that denied us access to our history, power, and innate wisdom.

For our entire lives we’ve been losing and losing and losing parts of ourselves. So of course we are not fully present now. Of course we are not able to be present in an authentic, whole way. The very path that we’ve taken to survive leaves us here, fractured.

Amanda

I am aware now, more than ever, of the boxes I’ve placed myself into—the ones that were introduced to me by my family and by my culture. I consciously stepped into them and closed the lid in order to stay safe, in order to be liked, in order to fit in. Now I’m pushing the boundaries I’ve set for myself so that I can settle into a new acceptance of who I am. It’s almost like I’m stuck in a flowerpot and I’m expanding while it’s breaking. It’s breaking. But in order to do that, in order to break out of my molds, I need to understand what they are and why they were made in the first place.

Alex Hedison

I’m like this because I carry the patterns of my family of origin.

The moment we’re born, we look up at our caretakers. We notice—before we even have language—what makes them smile and come close, what makes them frown and turn away. We notice—and we keep noticing—and then we adapt to survive. We magnify the parts of ourselves that earn us love and protection, and we hide what doesn’t. We know instinctively that we need our caretakers to survive—so we become what we believe they want us to be.

And then we grow up and one day we look in the mirror and wonder: Why am I still hiding so much of myself? Have I ever even met my real self?

Glennon

I became an athlete to get my mother’s love.

All I really wanted was love, full acceptance, and attention from my mom. But because I had this deep knowing about my gayness, I felt like my mom would never accept this part of me. So I developed an athlete persona to make up for my gayness. It worked! I was celebrated. But that kind of affirmation was something I could never really latch on to. I’d come home from soccer and my family would be so amazed at all my goals. But I always felt like: What if I stop scoring goals? Will they be able to love what’s left?

Abby

I became more attuned to others’ emotions than my own.

In my family, there was one person whose emotional fluctuations dictated everyone’s experience. This dynamic teaches a child to be highly attuned and vigilant to others’ emotions to keep the peace. I did that my entire life and only recently learned that it’s an actual thing. It’s called emotional monitoring, and it involves living your life as a fixer in hyperactive awareness of everyone else’s experience. You’re so busy keeping everyone comfortable that you completely lose any boundary between everybody else’s experience of a situation and your own. And because of that, you actually do not have your own experience. Their experience is your experience.

Amanda

I became extreme to be seen.

I used to speak in extremes. I didn’t just dislike someone, I hated them. I wasn’t just a little bit bored, I was going to die of boredom. It’s interesting to consider what kind of people feel the need to express themselves so dramatically. Maybe some of us learn early that our needs won’t be met unless we become extreme about them.

Glennon

I became a reflection of my dad’s values.

Growing up, my dad was making films like Grapes of Wrath and Twelve Angry Men, with strong, brave characters who stuck up for the underdogs. And I always knew those were the roles that he loved, representing the values that he respected. I wasn’t conscious of it then, but I think seeing the roles he loved was like fertilizer that was being sprinkled on my soul. When I learned the truth of the Vietnam War, that fertilizer allowed the sprouts of my activism to start growing.

Jane Fonda

I’m like this becauseI learned what earned me love and what didn’t.

I became a comedian to make my mom laugh.

It’s so hard to tell what part of our personality is a coping mechanism that was formed years ago and what’s our actual personality. Like, who would I have been if I’d grown up on a beach alone? I don’t know that I would’ve done comedy. I’m pretty introverted. I think we’re all just trying to cheer up our moms.