You Don't Know What Hard Means

You can’t complain about having a lot on your plate if your goal was to eat. Yet life can still feel hard and that is...entirely normal.

Photo by Fab Lentz on Unsplash

Hard is one of the most contentious words we have. Triggering all kinds of comparative emotional outrage, what one person finds hard, another sees as child’s play. A case in point, driving is exceptionally hard for me; reading is exceptionally hard for my husband. We can sympathise with each other to a certain extent, but we’ll never be able to fully perceive each other’s struggles. I was getting stuck into Dickens by year three; after his third lesson behind a wheel, his instructor told him to book a test. I have to check myself often in conversation when I refer to a book, because he’s never read one. It’s a challenge for me to remember; I find it nearly impossible to hook into his reality. Likewise, he gets frustrated that he’s always the driver, because he can’t quite hook into mine.

I work with lots of neurodiverse authors in my job as a ghostwriter. It’s something that’s become a bit of a calling card—helping writers with dyslexia or attention issues realise their literary potential. A by-product of thinking differently in a world which rewards neural conformity can often be a mental health battle. Collaborating with people in deep and often relentless pain has made me realise how easy so many of my days have been. I’ve never found it hard to leave the house outside of a self-inflicted situation involving Tommy’s margaritas the night before. Watching people I care about gird their loins just to make it over the threshold has made me realise how excruciatingly hard easy-looking things can be. It is, as they wisely tell us, all relative.

‘You don’t know what hard means’, is one of Instagram’s favourite rejoinders. It’s also imprecise. Better would be ‘you don’t know what my hard means’. That is always true. Of course, we’re now straying into the privilege Olympics. Systemic injustices make all sorts of things harder and easier. It’s hard luck that it’s not fair and anyone in a situation of ease—even if it’s temporary—has a certain duty to send a hand back. Nearly everything is either harder or easier for other people than for me and the same is true for you. Because we can’t feel anyone else’s pain, we’ll never know where we sit on the totem pole.