What I’m striving for next

You might be surprised

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During a recent conversation with my husband, I said something along the lines of, “I am great at fighting my way through hard things, but I am freaking tired. Shit does not need to be this hard.”

He responded with a lighthearted, humbling reminder that some of my significant life moments have been defined by doing things that I don’t like.

Ouch. LOL.

Also not wrong. Who knows if it is nature, nurture, or some combination of the two, but from an early age I had no choice but to put my head down and power through hard shit I didn’t want to do—for example, cleaning out thick, fetid milk scum from the bottom of dairy cases at the family convenience store and digging trenches in the backyard in the scorching summer heat while cramping my way through my first menstrual cycles as a teen. 

I grew to excel at doing hard things. My particular coping mechanism was to tamp down all manner of outward emotional responses—instead, stewing internally—in order to focus on executing the dreaded task at hand, which, by the way, I now know is more exhausting than just expressing and moving through the feelings.

One adult example involves my former career in academia. A key milestone of my Ph.D. program at Queen’s University was the comprehensive exam. This exam was the bridge between finishing major coursework requirements and writing the dissertation. The exam was designed to assess both the expansiveness and depth of your knowledge. It was considered a tortuous rite of academic passage.

As a graduate student in what was then known as the Brain, Behavior, & Cognitive Science track, my job was to spend eight weeks, day and night, cramming knowledge about human and animal perceptual and cognitive systems in service of a four-hour written exam. If I prepared well, I would have enough knowledge under my belt to teach both introductory and mid-level courses in auditory, visual, and tactile perception and cognition. 

It was daunting from a sheer volume level.

But the other significant issue was my challenge with information processing.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was able to articulate the problem—that even when I am listening to and engaging with someone in a conversation, many details will slip out of my brain as early as the next day. 

When it’s related to work or important family matters I compensate for my information retention issues by taking copious notes. It’s more awkward and distressing for me, though, when I have an important personal conversation and feel it would be awkward to whip out a Google doc and start typing, knowing that I may lose many details by the following day.

Repetition and immersion do help cement things in my memory. I now know that this is why I struggled in 101 college classes that cover a wide base of knowledge quickly, whereas I excelled at advanced courses where you dig deep into, and spend more time on, becoming a subject matter expert.

As a result, studying for comps was brutal because I needed many levels of repetition and writing and rewriting of notes in order to hold an unfathomable amount of information in a short window of time. It was like trying to plug holes in a sieve. At one point, surrounded by stacks of textbooks and journal articles and notes, I said to my husband, “Argh! I fucking hate reading journal articles!”

This, by the way, would have been a good time to reassess my academic career path. 

The other notable example involves running. I didn’t start running until I was in my 30s, after I became a mom, a questionable time given what pregnancy and delivery can do to your pelvic floor. 

Also, I am not built to run. Some people look effortless and gazelle-like when they run. I am not one of those people. I was often humbled on race courses—for example, when an Asian lady who appeared to be in her 60s ran by me wearing jeans, or when I was diced by a blind runner and their guide.

More power to these two people. I bowed down to them as they blew past me.

Meanwhile, despite my lack of natural physicality for running, I persisted, spending nearly a decade on an activity that felt like driving with the emergency brake engaged, training to run 5Ks, 10Ks, a 10 miler, and three half marathons.

And now? 

I am ready for things to be less hard. 

It feels long overdue.

I am ready to change my narrative.

Amidst a season of tumult—and in anticipation of the personal milestone of turning 50 in the fall—I have been thinking a lot about how I want to live my life, what matters most, and how to not let fear get in my way in the face of uncertainty.

The juxtaposition of these words is intentional in its irony, but in a nutshell: in this next phase of life, I am striving for ease.

Because I now know that there isn’t virtue in slogging through hard things just for the sake of the slog. One can, in fact, live a fulfilling life and do great work and it doesn’t need to be so fucking hard.

I’ll be sharing more about this soon in an Edit Your Life episode that, at the moment, is titled the “Summer of Small Delights.” It will be one piece of the puzzle in how I will be reorienting, calibrating, and crafting with intention a personal and work life that involves more joy and ease.

In service of this new way of life, I leaned into my ajumma vibes and ordered myself this amazing visor and wore it for the first time over the holiday weekend.

And as I wore it, surrounded by my sweet family, I thought: Here I am, truly living.