Day 18: You Can Do Hard Things

There’s something I’ve heard that I can’t fully attribute, probably because it’s common sense, or perhaps just sense. I’ve variously heard it from friends and relatives and a therapist and social media memes, and it goes along the lines of: sometimes, when you become a parent, you end up parenting yourself.

So often, this is the case; especially when the things you find yourself frustrated with your child over are the things you find frustrating in yourself, or when one of the ways in which they are starkly different to you throws your similarities or difficulties into sharp relief.

Our son is autistic, and for him this means he has what is sometimes called a “spiky development profile.” In practice it means he can go a very long time avoiding or not doing something before very suddenly starting to do it.

Today we took him, together with his sister, for his first swim in a while. This was a challenge because he has never vibed with the water — in sharp contrast to his little sister, who has loved it pretty much from the first — and he struggles. We persist with the swimming not just for water safety reasons but because he wants to enjoy the water and says as much; he just hasn’t found the key to unlock it yet.

He spent a lot of his time in the pool yelling and clinging, and Louise talked him through it. “You can do hard things,” she said (both children are Saint Ms Rachel fans). “You can do hard things.”

Our daughter was getting cold and clingy so I took her to get changed. While I did that the volume from the pool area seemed to turn down. Eventually it stopped. Had they got out?

No, he’d just found his key. Something flipped, something connected, and suddenly he was ecstatic to be in the water and climbing along the side and being brave. When he came back to the car he was buzzing. “I loved it! It was the best! I love swimming. Can we go again soon?”

And in witnessing it all I was reminded how much it is that life’s triumphs almost always come from facing the things we are frightened by, even when — sometimes especially when — those fears do not entirely make sense, and when they originate in things we would so very much like to do.

This newsletter and my video series is an experiment in facing down rejection sensitivity and over-thinking, and it is working, but even as it rides buoyant other things bob beneath the surface. Some things that very much need doing, often things that I have avoided because of semi-rational fears about being rejected, have fallen off in the course of this start-a-business experiment, and if I don’t pick them up they will never get done and I will never know what might have been.

So much of my self-improvement stuff has been about this; the longing for certain things to go from inscrutable eldritch horrors to easy. And some hard things have become easier; other things turned out to be unnecessary, but some things remain that are simply hard and may always be so. But they only reap any reward if they are done, and the only way they get less hard is in the doing.

“You can do hard things.”

Ms Rachel really is always right.

Upgrade now