We experienced a very significant trauma seven years ago. It often stuns people when they hear the story. There was so much pressure around that time…we had five children, including a newborn, and found ourselves facing a mountain of trauma and stress that is rather exceptional. I mean, I think it is? It was confusing even in the early years. I desperately needed a kind soul to see me. I could have used the sense of validation that comes when a person sees your pain and offers their tears and their ears. What we received, however, was often this weird avoidance or a gush of encouragement for how we were weathering the storm. It felt like we were rarely seen though. Not really. Very few people are able to enter in to that level of pain. And the time it takes to process and heal? People don’t stick around for that. We were just a few days into this story and we already had close family members leaving on their planned vacations while we remained in the PICU with one child and my due date with another loomed. The dissonance of it all, of watching people both shrink away from it and/or make it seem like we were so brave and triumphant (even in the very beginning), created a frustrating vortex of isolation and loneliness.
A few years ago we asked for pastoral counseling. We were just so stressed out. Trauma impacts you on all levels. Simple things like the regular noises of raising a family become major stressors. Legos rattling? Stainless steel snack bowls clanging? Shrieks and loud play? It can be hard, right? Parenting is hard. But when you’re experiencing all these normal things while your body is doing a darn good job keeping the score…it’s a next level hard.
So we attempted to unpack it all to this pastor and we told him about our stressors. Finances, extended family, the way even normal things felt very hard, how we feel so tender and raw even years into this journey. I think we hoped for validation? Maybe we hoped for intentional pastoral care? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do. So we poured out our grief to this pastor.
I think his response sort of shocked us. He compared us to other couples that he counsels and said we were doing so well. I believe he genuinely wanted to encourage us but when he left that night I remember feeling very confused. Am I supposed to be encouraged? What do we have to do to get people to understand that we’re hurting? Still. We’re still hurting.
I weary of the comparison game and often would have loved for the gift of a friend sharing THEIR struggles because I needed to know they had them too. But I also, perhaps, needed to hear the simple validation of the intensity of what my family has experienced. We needed the Church to recognize the impact of trauma and not offer us empty words but real help.
We have also needed presence. The impact of a person saying, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you. This is really intense. It makes me uncomfortable but I know you feel the discomfort in a deeper and more profound way so I won’t be put off by it. I’ll enter in and sit beside you. I see you.”
Anyway, I love this discussion and always appreciate the perspectives offered in this space.
This reminds me a lot of realizing (as an adult) that I have ADHD. People always said things like “studying is hard” or “staying focused is difficult” and I didn’t realize that what they meant by hard and what I was experiencing were not the same. I have since been able to improve my coping mechanisms and now that I’m done with school I have a lot more freedom to arrange my life in a way likely to lead to success. If I had known sooner that my experience wasn’t normal I might have been able to do a lot of this sooner.
This is not precisely an answer to any of the questions, but a reflection on the theme/title. The way the title is phrased is a summary of our current cultural standard (or possibly even, "I can't ask for help because someone, somewhere, is worse off than I am,"). A better model, in my opinion--although i know people's instinctive reaction may be a shudder--is the baby-shower/wedding-shower model, applied much more widely. In a life-event shower, the community around a person all chip in to purchase a lot of stuff that the person may suddenly need (this is less obvious nowadays for weddings, when couples often already have a home together that is more or less furnished, but it's VERY obvious for babies). As a participant, you observe these natural life events of your friends by paying out $30 here, $50 there, and then suddenly when it's your turn, you don't have to spend hundreds or thousands all at once, because everyone else is chipping in for you! And you don't feel guilty, because it is an expected benefit/expense model that we all are used to. So if we expand this model, we would naturally expect to help out our friends and family with the normal difficulties of life (a meal delivered here, a load of laundry there, flowers watered when they're on vacation, an errand run on a busy day), and then, because we have happily chipped in for others over time, we don't feel guilty or inadequate by allowing for help when it's our turn, even if our "difficult situation" is completely within the range of normal life--just like weddings and babies, which so many people experience. Lower the bar of "need." Help in small ways as often as possible. Offer assistance cheerfully and don't let people wave you off. Normalize service!
And anecdotally, in my experience, wealthier communities are worse than others in this regard... because why bother a friend for help, when you can pay for a service to fix whatever service you need? Why assume a person needs help at all, when they could pay for a service they need? So there's more of a hurdle to overcome, but it's even more important to do so.
I’m in the military. I had to leave my 10 month old baby for a three month deployment. I was an utter and complete mess and I was ashamed of it, because every mother in the military has to leave their children for deployment at some point. If anything I should have been grateful- most deployments are a lot longer than three months. Too ashamed to turn to anyone in real life, I turned to a Facebook mom’s group. I explained my situation and asked for advice, and I got crickets, except for one comment commiserating that my situation was indeed hard, and she’d pray for me. I took the lack of response as confirmation that my struggle to cope with leaving my child was pathetic. A few months later there was a post in that same group, a mom agonizing over whether or not she should leave her baby for an overnight work trip. The comments were many, with strong opinions, including people assuring this poor woman that being away for one night would “destroy her attachment” to her child. That was definitely not great, but it made the scales fall from my eyes - my situation was not normal. Just because every mother in the military has to face a similarly horrible situation doesn’t make it NOT a horrible situation. I think I got the response I did - “shrug, wow that’s too bad” - because people just didn’t know how to relate.
This really strikes a chord with my experience with depression, especially in the couple of years before I got a proper diagnosis.
I would occasionally tell people about mornings where "I just had so little motivation to get up", and they'd nod and say "I feel that!" or "Ugh I hate that!" and I think all of us thought we were describing the same experience. But of course "I'm sleepy and want to stay in bed" and "I will literally lie here motionless and miserable for hours because I can't find the willpower even just to sit up" are not quite the same feeling.
I'm not really sure could have been done differently. Maybe making it normal to invite people to share specifics of problems they describe to you, even if you think you understand what they're talking about? It seems rough to put the onus of change on the person struggling to get through the experience they think is normal, especially if they have any sort of "you're just making this all about you" inner voice adding guilt to it all.
I started to have heartburn when I was a senior in college, and it was unpleasant but I figured it was just what grownups dealt with. After all, my grandma kept Tums on her dresser all the time (turns out she was normally just taking them as calcium supplements). It wasn't until my local Walmart was remodeling and I found myself in the new heartburn aisle instead of the old toothpaste aisle that I saw a poster informing me that "frequent" heartburn was anything more than two times per week. Two times per week?!? I had heartburn at least that many times per day, nearly every day of my life.
I've so appreciated the community you've built here, Leah, and all the heartfelt comments folks have shared! One thing I will say on the flip of unhelpful commiseration is the joy of finding niche communities online of people who share similar experiences or (like this group!) approach others helpfully and with genuine feeling.
My husband is a survivor of domestic abuse and trauma. In the years since he has come into a religious community and has struggled with depression, anxiety, anger and a variety of other struggles, many of them related to processing his past, while preparing to serve in ministry. As he's reached out for help, he's been told that these struggles are normal temptations for everyone. Because he is so outwardly competent and high-functioning, it's taken us waay longer than it should have to realize that he needs more help and support than just the regular means of grace in the church. There's a such a stigma in some religious communities about seeking help outside the community. But too often, no one in the community knows what to do about these types of issues besides recycle the same advice that has only served to make people feel that these deep struggles are normal—and then feel ashamed that they can't be normal like everyone else.
I was 23 when I went to the doctor for my thyroid to get tested. In response to my complaints about years long fatigue, a PCP told me “it’s normal to get tired as you get older.” Of course he was wrong and it took me another year and a half to figure it out. I’m not sure I would have, if it weren’t for the church’s teaching on natural family planning. (My fertility signs showed further evidence of thyroid problems.)
I think one of the challenges is that we are told to try and be empathetic. To be a listening ear and to not “try to solve problems.” But there is an empathetic way to draw out more information that can help diagnose or repair instead of resigning someone to the situation.
Growing up, I heard a lot about "sibling rivalry" and how it was normal/usual for siblings to fight. In my case, I don't think it was normal for a sibling to throw hot liquids in my face, drinking glasses at my head, and hit me in front of my friends. Not to mention constant verbal abuse in person and over text and how I felt like I was walking around on eggshells around this sibling, knowing that the slightest thing could set off the abuse. I think things like "sibling rivalry" led my parents to downplay this as well, saying things like I must have done something to upset my sibling, how it takes two to make an argument, how we must be equally to blame, etc. I never stood up for myself because of this and thought that it was all my fault that these things happened to me. Probably many people who have been abused have felt similarly, that the abuse is just "sibling rivalry" or that "marriage is hard" or that "raising kids is hard."
The effect of this was that I never learned how to stick up for myself. In my first job after graduation, a colleague yelled and slammed the door at me. I didn't even think to report it, it felt so normal to me--but my other coworkers reported it, they knew it was wrong. And that was the canary in the coal mine for me: maybe what I experienced as a child, and the treatment I had come to expect as an adult, was not normal.
Everyone said marriage was hard, that you have to sacrificially love your spouse over yourself, that you have to put your own preferences to death, that love needs work, and that you can’t expect to be happy all of the time. So, well, I figured I just needed to work on things, stop being so self-centered, and love him more. That was, after all, what my husband kept telling me.
I must really be selfish for wanting to go on a three-mile run a few days a week, and sit down with a book for a half hour after kiddo was in bed. I must really be lazy because I only loaded the dishwasher and started a load of laundry after my 12-hour shift, instead of cleaning the entire kitchen and sweeping the floors. It was unforgivably self-centered to want to go back to school. If I asked to stop during painful sex, I was clearly putting my needs above his and failing at self-sacrificial love. If I wanted to have dinner with friends once a month, I was selfishly abandoning my family and rejecting my marriage. So he told me, at great length, at every opportunity.
If I was crying almost daily because I was so routinely being berated for putting my selfish needs over those of my family, this was my problem to solve; marriage is hard! If it made me nauseous to be near him because he forced himself on me physically, I needed to learn to say yes; marriage is about giving! If I had to ask permission to move the toaster, this was an example of learning to put someone else’s preferences above my own!
I wasn’t able to articulate how abnormal this all was until much, much later. I didn’t go into details with friends because I knew “marriage is hard,” and mostly our conversations started and ended there. I actually left him *before* I realized how not-normal this amount of hard was, and blamed myself for my ultimate failure and selfishness of refusing to keep working on it.
Well over a year later, I was going round this little track of “it was horrible but marriage is hard; I just failed” with a dear friend who is also, it happens, a prosecutor. He stopped me mid-description to point out that some of the things I had experienced were so bad that they were *actually felonies.*
Everything was always hard and confusing. I got called melodramatic a lot. I figured I was just difficult like I was told. These days it would be "extra". I didn't know why social stuff was so complicated or why I needed some things just so. I was told I was weird, controlling, pretending to not understand obvious things. As an adult, when I tried to talk to other parents about how hard things were, they would sympathetically agree that yeah, x happened to them too. I would think sure, but it's not hard for me on some days. And I can see you manage more than I can on a regular basis. If I lived one of your days I would need days to recover. Turns out I'm autistic. All those things ARE harder for me. I can't do many things as much and as well as other people but when I'm in co-ops, I'm asked to take on more than someone with a visible disability or smh illness would because I don't look like I can't.
This is actually a problem in *super intense* undergraduate programs. I went to architecture school, where I was told all our problems would be solvable with "time management," and we just had to "use our time wisely." Turns out most other peoples' "all-nighters" are due to them not having done the work along the way, and usually involve four whole hours of sleep! They're not happening because your professor changed your project two weeks before the deadline and so you've seen the sun rise every day this week, and you were previously getting four hours of sleep a night until this project got scrapped and restarted. And because schools and cohorts like this tend to self-silo, it's not until you're long out of college before you start to realise that other people actually did have time to build real friendships and go on crazy adventures -- time that you didn't have, but everyone talked about how Hard College Is, so you thought maybe you're just having a harder time adjusting than other people do, especially when you used to be a straight-A student and now everything feels so much harder.
The weird side of this is then that you had, fresh out of high school, an experience most people don't have until their graduate studies, and even then it's not always the case, so the comradely commiseration starts to feel like a version of misery poker but where the other players can't read your cards properly. It also often results in an ingrained unhealthy mindset which inevitably transfers over into the professional world, where you're then expected to continue to Work Very Hard All the Time, so an enormous number of firms (not all, but a dangerous amount) exploit their interns and expect them to sacrifice their lives for their work.
In the pandemic, it's hard to tell who's having an abnormally hard experience because there are so many potential axes of "hard" that seem apples to oranges. Did I have a hard early-pandemic experience because from March through June 2020 I had a barely-three-year-old (who started having a ton of potty accidents from the weird alterations to her daily life, but then threw kicking-screaming fits when my husband and I put her on the potty more) and an under-one-year-old at home because their daycare shut down for that time? But does it qualify as hard anymore if I tell you that for that period I got to drop down to half-time at work on FMLA coverage, do the rest of my work remotely, have a ton of childcare help from my husband (working remotely also), and have no money issues? Yet it felt super-hard compared to most of my colleagues where I work in higher ed...yet not as hard compared to my students, who (because I was working for a TRIO SSS program) were largely low-income students who suddenly found themselves either laid off or working front-line jobs, and had to endure a chaotic shift to remote learning on top of it. But they tended to be fairly young and often without children of their own, but some. helped care for other family members. So there was a lot of "this is hard for everyone," but there was no real way to determine what a normal amount of hard was...plus, even if you feel like it's abnormally hard, it's a pandemic. What exactly do you do, in Spring 2020, to fix it?
Some thoughts on commiseration in general, from my experience... I think we feel like we need to have some sort of answer or positive comment on hand when we hear that someone's having a hard time. Or, as Leah says, we respond to a person's story of suffering by sharing what we believe to be a similar experience that has happened to us, or to someone we know, which inevitably boils down to either "Cheer up! Things will get better!" or "Cheer up! Things could be worse!" Both may be true, but 95% of the time they don't address the root of the problem.
I have been the recipient of much advice during an ongoing medical situation. Some of it has been helpful; some has definitely not. Ultimately I am thankful for people's desire to help, even if they haven't found the right words; in all fairness there is rarely a "right" response, and what works one day might be an epic fail the next. But I've learned some things in the process. People who are experiencing difficulty are mostly not looking for advice as such (they've probably heard it before, they know it, they may even agree with it - but it's not what they came for), but just for someone to share the weight of the burden they're carrying.
One instance stands out in my mind, when I was in tears and a friend put her arm around me and said simply: "I wish I could take it all away." Not pretending to know, not saying it will get better, not offering any suggestions. To me it was an embodiment of compassion, "to suffer with". This is the example I want to keep in my mind when confronted with the needs of others.
This really relate to something I'm living right now. I'm a PhD student (in mathematics). As everybody knows, PhDs are hard as students struggle with hard work (both in quantity and difficulty), dim career prospects, and feeling of inadequacy. Mine is going particularly badly, symptomatically because I'm currently reading your articles and commenting instead of writing my paper - I am almost unable to work seriously and efficiently without a strong deadline and PhDs don't have those. If my interpretation is correct, my problems comes from a personal weakness (and that would hint at a career in research just not being the right path for me).
However everybody says to me that it's normal to struggle, it's normal to understand almost nothing at conferences, it's normal to find it difficult to get ideas for proofs or to understand papers. But I still feel like my problems are on a different level altogether, and the general expectation of difficulty makes it really hard do understand if that's really the case.
We experienced a very significant trauma seven years ago. It often stuns people when they hear the story. There was so much pressure around that time…we had five children, including a newborn, and found ourselves facing a mountain of trauma and stress that is rather exceptional. I mean, I think it is? It was confusing even in the early years. I desperately needed a kind soul to see me. I could have used the sense of validation that comes when a person sees your pain and offers their tears and their ears. What we received, however, was often this weird avoidance or a gush of encouragement for how we were weathering the storm. It felt like we were rarely seen though. Not really. Very few people are able to enter in to that level of pain. And the time it takes to process and heal? People don’t stick around for that. We were just a few days into this story and we already had close family members leaving on their planned vacations while we remained in the PICU with one child and my due date with another loomed. The dissonance of it all, of watching people both shrink away from it and/or make it seem like we were so brave and triumphant (even in the very beginning), created a frustrating vortex of isolation and loneliness.
A few years ago we asked for pastoral counseling. We were just so stressed out. Trauma impacts you on all levels. Simple things like the regular noises of raising a family become major stressors. Legos rattling? Stainless steel snack bowls clanging? Shrieks and loud play? It can be hard, right? Parenting is hard. But when you’re experiencing all these normal things while your body is doing a darn good job keeping the score…it’s a next level hard.
So we attempted to unpack it all to this pastor and we told him about our stressors. Finances, extended family, the way even normal things felt very hard, how we feel so tender and raw even years into this journey. I think we hoped for validation? Maybe we hoped for intentional pastoral care? I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do. So we poured out our grief to this pastor.
I think his response sort of shocked us. He compared us to other couples that he counsels and said we were doing so well. I believe he genuinely wanted to encourage us but when he left that night I remember feeling very confused. Am I supposed to be encouraged? What do we have to do to get people to understand that we’re hurting? Still. We’re still hurting.
I weary of the comparison game and often would have loved for the gift of a friend sharing THEIR struggles because I needed to know they had them too. But I also, perhaps, needed to hear the simple validation of the intensity of what my family has experienced. We needed the Church to recognize the impact of trauma and not offer us empty words but real help.
We have also needed presence. The impact of a person saying, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m with you. This is really intense. It makes me uncomfortable but I know you feel the discomfort in a deeper and more profound way so I won’t be put off by it. I’ll enter in and sit beside you. I see you.”
Anyway, I love this discussion and always appreciate the perspectives offered in this space.
This reminds me a lot of realizing (as an adult) that I have ADHD. People always said things like “studying is hard” or “staying focused is difficult” and I didn’t realize that what they meant by hard and what I was experiencing were not the same. I have since been able to improve my coping mechanisms and now that I’m done with school I have a lot more freedom to arrange my life in a way likely to lead to success. If I had known sooner that my experience wasn’t normal I might have been able to do a lot of this sooner.
This is not precisely an answer to any of the questions, but a reflection on the theme/title. The way the title is phrased is a summary of our current cultural standard (or possibly even, "I can't ask for help because someone, somewhere, is worse off than I am,"). A better model, in my opinion--although i know people's instinctive reaction may be a shudder--is the baby-shower/wedding-shower model, applied much more widely. In a life-event shower, the community around a person all chip in to purchase a lot of stuff that the person may suddenly need (this is less obvious nowadays for weddings, when couples often already have a home together that is more or less furnished, but it's VERY obvious for babies). As a participant, you observe these natural life events of your friends by paying out $30 here, $50 there, and then suddenly when it's your turn, you don't have to spend hundreds or thousands all at once, because everyone else is chipping in for you! And you don't feel guilty, because it is an expected benefit/expense model that we all are used to. So if we expand this model, we would naturally expect to help out our friends and family with the normal difficulties of life (a meal delivered here, a load of laundry there, flowers watered when they're on vacation, an errand run on a busy day), and then, because we have happily chipped in for others over time, we don't feel guilty or inadequate by allowing for help when it's our turn, even if our "difficult situation" is completely within the range of normal life--just like weddings and babies, which so many people experience. Lower the bar of "need." Help in small ways as often as possible. Offer assistance cheerfully and don't let people wave you off. Normalize service!
And anecdotally, in my experience, wealthier communities are worse than others in this regard... because why bother a friend for help, when you can pay for a service to fix whatever service you need? Why assume a person needs help at all, when they could pay for a service they need? So there's more of a hurdle to overcome, but it's even more important to do so.
I’m in the military. I had to leave my 10 month old baby for a three month deployment. I was an utter and complete mess and I was ashamed of it, because every mother in the military has to leave their children for deployment at some point. If anything I should have been grateful- most deployments are a lot longer than three months. Too ashamed to turn to anyone in real life, I turned to a Facebook mom’s group. I explained my situation and asked for advice, and I got crickets, except for one comment commiserating that my situation was indeed hard, and she’d pray for me. I took the lack of response as confirmation that my struggle to cope with leaving my child was pathetic. A few months later there was a post in that same group, a mom agonizing over whether or not she should leave her baby for an overnight work trip. The comments were many, with strong opinions, including people assuring this poor woman that being away for one night would “destroy her attachment” to her child. That was definitely not great, but it made the scales fall from my eyes - my situation was not normal. Just because every mother in the military has to face a similarly horrible situation doesn’t make it NOT a horrible situation. I think I got the response I did - “shrug, wow that’s too bad” - because people just didn’t know how to relate.
This really strikes a chord with my experience with depression, especially in the couple of years before I got a proper diagnosis.
I would occasionally tell people about mornings where "I just had so little motivation to get up", and they'd nod and say "I feel that!" or "Ugh I hate that!" and I think all of us thought we were describing the same experience. But of course "I'm sleepy and want to stay in bed" and "I will literally lie here motionless and miserable for hours because I can't find the willpower even just to sit up" are not quite the same feeling.
I'm not really sure could have been done differently. Maybe making it normal to invite people to share specifics of problems they describe to you, even if you think you understand what they're talking about? It seems rough to put the onus of change on the person struggling to get through the experience they think is normal, especially if they have any sort of "you're just making this all about you" inner voice adding guilt to it all.
I started to have heartburn when I was a senior in college, and it was unpleasant but I figured it was just what grownups dealt with. After all, my grandma kept Tums on her dresser all the time (turns out she was normally just taking them as calcium supplements). It wasn't until my local Walmart was remodeling and I found myself in the new heartburn aisle instead of the old toothpaste aisle that I saw a poster informing me that "frequent" heartburn was anything more than two times per week. Two times per week?!? I had heartburn at least that many times per day, nearly every day of my life.
I've so appreciated the community you've built here, Leah, and all the heartfelt comments folks have shared! One thing I will say on the flip of unhelpful commiseration is the joy of finding niche communities online of people who share similar experiences or (like this group!) approach others helpfully and with genuine feeling.
My husband is a survivor of domestic abuse and trauma. In the years since he has come into a religious community and has struggled with depression, anxiety, anger and a variety of other struggles, many of them related to processing his past, while preparing to serve in ministry. As he's reached out for help, he's been told that these struggles are normal temptations for everyone. Because he is so outwardly competent and high-functioning, it's taken us waay longer than it should have to realize that he needs more help and support than just the regular means of grace in the church. There's a such a stigma in some religious communities about seeking help outside the community. But too often, no one in the community knows what to do about these types of issues besides recycle the same advice that has only served to make people feel that these deep struggles are normal—and then feel ashamed that they can't be normal like everyone else.
I was 23 when I went to the doctor for my thyroid to get tested. In response to my complaints about years long fatigue, a PCP told me “it’s normal to get tired as you get older.” Of course he was wrong and it took me another year and a half to figure it out. I’m not sure I would have, if it weren’t for the church’s teaching on natural family planning. (My fertility signs showed further evidence of thyroid problems.)
I think one of the challenges is that we are told to try and be empathetic. To be a listening ear and to not “try to solve problems.” But there is an empathetic way to draw out more information that can help diagnose or repair instead of resigning someone to the situation.
Growing up, I heard a lot about "sibling rivalry" and how it was normal/usual for siblings to fight. In my case, I don't think it was normal for a sibling to throw hot liquids in my face, drinking glasses at my head, and hit me in front of my friends. Not to mention constant verbal abuse in person and over text and how I felt like I was walking around on eggshells around this sibling, knowing that the slightest thing could set off the abuse. I think things like "sibling rivalry" led my parents to downplay this as well, saying things like I must have done something to upset my sibling, how it takes two to make an argument, how we must be equally to blame, etc. I never stood up for myself because of this and thought that it was all my fault that these things happened to me. Probably many people who have been abused have felt similarly, that the abuse is just "sibling rivalry" or that "marriage is hard" or that "raising kids is hard."
The effect of this was that I never learned how to stick up for myself. In my first job after graduation, a colleague yelled and slammed the door at me. I didn't even think to report it, it felt so normal to me--but my other coworkers reported it, they knew it was wrong. And that was the canary in the coal mine for me: maybe what I experienced as a child, and the treatment I had come to expect as an adult, was not normal.
Marriage. Oh, Lord, marriage.
Everyone said marriage was hard, that you have to sacrificially love your spouse over yourself, that you have to put your own preferences to death, that love needs work, and that you can’t expect to be happy all of the time. So, well, I figured I just needed to work on things, stop being so self-centered, and love him more. That was, after all, what my husband kept telling me.
I must really be selfish for wanting to go on a three-mile run a few days a week, and sit down with a book for a half hour after kiddo was in bed. I must really be lazy because I only loaded the dishwasher and started a load of laundry after my 12-hour shift, instead of cleaning the entire kitchen and sweeping the floors. It was unforgivably self-centered to want to go back to school. If I asked to stop during painful sex, I was clearly putting my needs above his and failing at self-sacrificial love. If I wanted to have dinner with friends once a month, I was selfishly abandoning my family and rejecting my marriage. So he told me, at great length, at every opportunity.
If I was crying almost daily because I was so routinely being berated for putting my selfish needs over those of my family, this was my problem to solve; marriage is hard! If it made me nauseous to be near him because he forced himself on me physically, I needed to learn to say yes; marriage is about giving! If I had to ask permission to move the toaster, this was an example of learning to put someone else’s preferences above my own!
I wasn’t able to articulate how abnormal this all was until much, much later. I didn’t go into details with friends because I knew “marriage is hard,” and mostly our conversations started and ended there. I actually left him *before* I realized how not-normal this amount of hard was, and blamed myself for my ultimate failure and selfishness of refusing to keep working on it.
Well over a year later, I was going round this little track of “it was horrible but marriage is hard; I just failed” with a dear friend who is also, it happens, a prosecutor. He stopped me mid-description to point out that some of the things I had experienced were so bad that they were *actually felonies.*
I think that’s when I started my real recovery.
Everything was always hard and confusing. I got called melodramatic a lot. I figured I was just difficult like I was told. These days it would be "extra". I didn't know why social stuff was so complicated or why I needed some things just so. I was told I was weird, controlling, pretending to not understand obvious things. As an adult, when I tried to talk to other parents about how hard things were, they would sympathetically agree that yeah, x happened to them too. I would think sure, but it's not hard for me on some days. And I can see you manage more than I can on a regular basis. If I lived one of your days I would need days to recover. Turns out I'm autistic. All those things ARE harder for me. I can't do many things as much and as well as other people but when I'm in co-ops, I'm asked to take on more than someone with a visible disability or smh illness would because I don't look like I can't.
This is actually a problem in *super intense* undergraduate programs. I went to architecture school, where I was told all our problems would be solvable with "time management," and we just had to "use our time wisely." Turns out most other peoples' "all-nighters" are due to them not having done the work along the way, and usually involve four whole hours of sleep! They're not happening because your professor changed your project two weeks before the deadline and so you've seen the sun rise every day this week, and you were previously getting four hours of sleep a night until this project got scrapped and restarted. And because schools and cohorts like this tend to self-silo, it's not until you're long out of college before you start to realise that other people actually did have time to build real friendships and go on crazy adventures -- time that you didn't have, but everyone talked about how Hard College Is, so you thought maybe you're just having a harder time adjusting than other people do, especially when you used to be a straight-A student and now everything feels so much harder.
The weird side of this is then that you had, fresh out of high school, an experience most people don't have until their graduate studies, and even then it's not always the case, so the comradely commiseration starts to feel like a version of misery poker but where the other players can't read your cards properly. It also often results in an ingrained unhealthy mindset which inevitably transfers over into the professional world, where you're then expected to continue to Work Very Hard All the Time, so an enormous number of firms (not all, but a dangerous amount) exploit their interns and expect them to sacrifice their lives for their work.
In the pandemic, it's hard to tell who's having an abnormally hard experience because there are so many potential axes of "hard" that seem apples to oranges. Did I have a hard early-pandemic experience because from March through June 2020 I had a barely-three-year-old (who started having a ton of potty accidents from the weird alterations to her daily life, but then threw kicking-screaming fits when my husband and I put her on the potty more) and an under-one-year-old at home because their daycare shut down for that time? But does it qualify as hard anymore if I tell you that for that period I got to drop down to half-time at work on FMLA coverage, do the rest of my work remotely, have a ton of childcare help from my husband (working remotely also), and have no money issues? Yet it felt super-hard compared to most of my colleagues where I work in higher ed...yet not as hard compared to my students, who (because I was working for a TRIO SSS program) were largely low-income students who suddenly found themselves either laid off or working front-line jobs, and had to endure a chaotic shift to remote learning on top of it. But they tended to be fairly young and often without children of their own, but some. helped care for other family members. So there was a lot of "this is hard for everyone," but there was no real way to determine what a normal amount of hard was...plus, even if you feel like it's abnormally hard, it's a pandemic. What exactly do you do, in Spring 2020, to fix it?
Some thoughts on commiseration in general, from my experience... I think we feel like we need to have some sort of answer or positive comment on hand when we hear that someone's having a hard time. Or, as Leah says, we respond to a person's story of suffering by sharing what we believe to be a similar experience that has happened to us, or to someone we know, which inevitably boils down to either "Cheer up! Things will get better!" or "Cheer up! Things could be worse!" Both may be true, but 95% of the time they don't address the root of the problem.
I have been the recipient of much advice during an ongoing medical situation. Some of it has been helpful; some has definitely not. Ultimately I am thankful for people's desire to help, even if they haven't found the right words; in all fairness there is rarely a "right" response, and what works one day might be an epic fail the next. But I've learned some things in the process. People who are experiencing difficulty are mostly not looking for advice as such (they've probably heard it before, they know it, they may even agree with it - but it's not what they came for), but just for someone to share the weight of the burden they're carrying.
One instance stands out in my mind, when I was in tears and a friend put her arm around me and said simply: "I wish I could take it all away." Not pretending to know, not saying it will get better, not offering any suggestions. To me it was an embodiment of compassion, "to suffer with". This is the example I want to keep in my mind when confronted with the needs of others.
This really relate to something I'm living right now. I'm a PhD student (in mathematics). As everybody knows, PhDs are hard as students struggle with hard work (both in quantity and difficulty), dim career prospects, and feeling of inadequacy. Mine is going particularly badly, symptomatically because I'm currently reading your articles and commenting instead of writing my paper - I am almost unable to work seriously and efficiently without a strong deadline and PhDs don't have those. If my interpretation is correct, my problems comes from a personal weakness (and that would hint at a career in research just not being the right path for me).
However everybody says to me that it's normal to struggle, it's normal to understand almost nothing at conferences, it's normal to find it difficult to get ideas for proofs or to understand papers. But I still feel like my problems are on a different level altogether, and the general expectation of difficulty makes it really hard do understand if that's really the case.