The Hardest Thing I’ve Ever Done
Someone asked me recently, “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” and it forced me to reflect.
My life is characterized by constant, little struggles that I intentionally choose so that I can continue to grow. I push myself slightly outside my comfort zone little by little, bit by bit, so that it’s not even noticeable when it’s happening. After a year, that 1% growth each day makes me 37 times better than when I started, as Atomic Habits author James Clear explains.
That’s a huge difference, and that sounds like a good deal for me.
Then, there are some moments that I can look back on life where it was definitely more than a “1% out of my comfort zone” situation. Those were some of my hardest times.
As I write this, there are two specific events that stand out the most, which I’ll dive into the details about. But before I dive in, there’s two pieces of context I feel are necessary to get on the same page about first. One is the pitfall of comparing trauma, and the second is about how this article will inevitably get outdated.
As you read this—identify, don’t compare
One element that’s really important in this discussion is the tendency we can have to compare our hard times with other people’s hard times. Hard times are hard enough, and this toxic way of looking at them only makes it even harder.
A lot of times the toxic positivity movement promotes this idea of, “Be happy–it could always be worse.” In actuality, this just engrains the idea that we should never be sad, mad, or angry about what we’re actually going through in our own lives, and it fosters a counterproductive level of deep denial and dissociation.)
So I’m going to share my hardest times here. My ask for you, the reader, is this– don’t read this to compare and see if your hard time is more or less hard than mine. That’s not the point. If you’re reading it that way, you’re missing the element of connection that is being offered here.
Read the stories and look for identification. In other words, you may have had a different experience, but see if you can identify and relate with the feelings underneath of what I was going through. That’s what really matters. We all have different stories, a different series of life events that we’ve been through, but underneath it all, we share the same feelings about those events. Maybe sadness, hopelessness, fear, anger, confusion, disbelief–whatever it is.
Look for those threads. The story of what happened is just there to give context. The real important stuff here is the series of feelings that I went through and how I managed to get through them.
That way, if you had or have the same feelings, even in a different circumstance, you can take away some hope of how you can get through them, too. So please, stay open minded, and don’t talk down to yourself if you’ve had a different hard time that you feel like “isn’t as bad.” Same goes for if you’ve had “worse” moments that stand out for your life.
By closing yourself off to what my experience was, you’re cutting yourself off from the shared connection we experience in hard times that we as human beings all go through. So give yourself a break, you belong here.
This automatically will become an outdated answer
The second point before we dive in is that when you ask someone the hardest thing they’ve ever done or been through, you’ll immediately get an answer that becomes outdated as soon as they say it. What I mean by that is it’s not a static answer that stays true forever.
Someone can only answer that question with what’s been true to their awareness up to that moment, and things may change dramatically in the future. Whether that’s a new hard thing that comes up, or awareness of something that they’ve previously blocked off (trauma can do that).
It’d be like asking someone, “What’s the heaviest weight you can bench press?”
They can give you an answer today, and tomorrow they can immediately render that answer outdated by lifting (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) something even heavier. So I want to make sure there’s that understanding that what follows is an answer that may change in the future.
Welcome to being human.
Common theme in my hardest moments
When I think of the hardest moments for me in my life so far, there are two situations that come up for me, both in recent memory of the last few years. One was leaving a romantic relationship and one was leaving a professional relationship. They both hold a similar theme for me.
The hardest thing I’ve done is letting go of things that are causing me pain.
I know, on the surface that makes no sense. It’d be like saying, “The hardest thing I did was take my hand off a hot stove.”
On the surface it may seem like, “Well, it was painful, so isn’t it easy to walk away from it, to put two and two together that this situation equals pain and leaving equals things getting better?”
Well, you’re right. It would be that simple, if there weren’t trauma involved. How many times have you heard of people in toxic or abusive relationships that on the surface just seems like the answer is, “Why don’t you just leave?” The answer is always more complicated and deeply woven.
The impact of trauma on reliving the same pain
In both of those hard times, I didn't see it that clearly at the time. I can only say that they even belong to that same theme now as I’m standing outside of it and looking back.
You see, I’m a survivor of childhood trauma. One thing that’s common for people who have experienced trauma is that they have an inner pull to recreate some of the same patterns of pain they’ve experienced earlier in life.
(It might sound totally illogical, but there’s actually lots of science and psychology for why this happens, and it actually makes a lot of sense when you look at all the factors involved. Basically, we’re looking for healing, so we have a tendency to go back to the “scene of the crime” as it were, hoping to find a resolution this time. Some people go through these cycles their entire life, in one bad or abusive relationship after another, for example. I’ll get deeper into this another day.)
So that bears some consideration in this conversation. Sometimes the hard times are inflicted on us without our consent. Sometimes, we create the circumstances for the hard things that are happening to us. It might even look like we’re inflicting it on ourselves. For me, it definitely would have seemed that way from the outside, but there’s always more to the story.
Walking away from a 7 ½ year relationship w/ my fiancé
To give you an example of how this can get tricky, before this year, my hardest moment wasn’t crystallized in my head as simple as “Taking my hand off the burning stove.” It was “Leaving a 7 ½ year relationship with my fiance, my house, the life I’ve built and grown up in the majority of my 20s.”
You see how all of a sudden it’s not that crystal clear? Because then the next question is, “Well, was it causing you pain?” And the answer is, yes, it was. And, it also was a habit to minimize the pain, to tell myself that actually, letting go and leaving would be more painful, and that it wasn’t actually that bad (sound familiar to our earlier talk about comparing and minimizing traumas?).
It convinced me to choose the pain of staying over the pain of the unknown. And that’s what I did for a long time.
Let’s look at that 1% scenario again. If something or a situation is only 1% painful for me, it’s like I'm in a pot of boiling water– I don’t realize that I’m slowly burning up because it’s happening so slowly, and it’s easy to make excuses for it.
That was me.
Is it the realization that's harder, or taking action on it?
Coming to that honest realization that I needed to leave that relationship and then actually doing something about it was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I'm not sure if it’s the honest realization part that’s harder, or the actual action part, so for all intents and purposes, I’m lumping them together as all that was involved in leaving that relationship and starting over again.
Side note: Although, giving a quick thought to it just now, for me personally I think the inner realization is the hardest part. Quick background on me—I have a very strong denial and dissociation pattern due to trauma I’d experienced when I was a kid.
That means that I can be VERY good at lying to myself and not even knowing that I’m doing it. In the past, this has gotten me in a lot of pain. It kept me in that metaphorical pot of boiling water while saying to myself, “It’s not that bad here. It’s actually kind of nice. I’m just sweating a little bit, it’s not a big deal. In fact, it’s probably good I’m sweating, it’s releasing toxins in my body…” Yea. That’s the way my mind can work.
And when I look at the hardest times in my life, that’s exactly the pattern of thinking that had to be broken.
For me, waking up to reality is probably always the hardest part. The thing is, once I know or see something, it’s very hard to know or unsee it. So once I’m clear that “this relationship is not good for me” I’m moved to action very quickly to act in accordance with it. The steeper part of the hill for me has definitely got to be the awareness and realization that I'm in pain, finally being honest with myself about it.
Sometimes, the inner awareness part in itself is really painful. Because then it also forces me to come to terms with how I’ve been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want, as Professional Coach and author Jerry Colona would say.
Of course, I can give myself grace for not knowing what I know now, but it’s still a painful realization, one I’m still working through in many ways even today–forgiving myself for the pain I’ve put myself through.
Up until about 8 months ago, had you asked me the hardest thing I’ve done, It would've been letting go of that relationship.
What made it so hard?
It was, at the time, the most painful thing I’ve ever felt. The emotional pain of heartbreak was new for me. This was the first serious romantic relationship I’d been in, and it was a relationship I’d grown up with– we’d gotten together when I was still a teenager. We’d moved across the country and started a new life together. We bought a house and got dogs and cats together. We were engaged, and I really thought this was it.
I had to come to terms with “This is not healthy for me, this is not good for me, and it’s causing me a lot of pain.” And once I did that, things only got more painful through the process of reinventing my life, moving out of my house into an apartment (weird transition, can anyone relate?) and finding a new place to live and start over again.
All the context around the specifics of the situation just made it very ugly and very painful.
This was along with the really challenging time I had in navigating cutting the cord to the previous life in dissolving the house and mortgage relationship I then had with my ex. On the surface it seems pretty simple and straightforward, but for me, the added layers of emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation, and feeling out of control was enough to make me feel like my insides were burning up from the inside.
Starting to take a new look at the relationship through the lens of this newfound honesty – not lying to myself about the pain I was in– was very painful.
What helped me get through it?
It helped when friends would explain that the brain and body don’t know the difference between emotional heartbreak and physical trauma, like if I’d broken one of my legs. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I felt so paralyzed, and I didn’t know how I’d make it through. I'm grateful for the coping skills I’d built up before that time, because I needed every single one of them in order to make it through that in one piece, and also with dignity and grace, with respect and holding onto my core values.
Wooooh. Just looking back at that is so heartbreaking. Not the relationship ending, but the pain that I had to endure. I’m able to look at myself in the third person and have such empathy and compassion for that person who went through that.
The fact that I didn’t take that pain and decide to self-destruct even more by relapsing on drugs or alcohol (I was just celebrating 9 years clean at the time) is amazing to me. It was by far the hardest thing I’d gone through in my recovery, and in my life at that point.
My body was breaking down. It was shaking with tremors and anxiety from the moment that I woke up, and I couldn't make it stop. My body was so tense every moment of the day, those days.
Man. That girl went through some hard times. It was so confusing. I felt like I had no grounding, I wasn’t even sure what reality was anymore, because I was in enough pain to get me to leave, and then it felt like the other person was looking for ways to cause more pain as a repercussion for that decision. It felt like it would never end. Also, add in the mindfuck of this being the person you thought was the closest to you, the one who knew you the best, and they’re the one causing you the most pain.
Writing helped me get through a lot from that time, here’s a couple key pieces that helped:
People would ask me how I was doing, and I would just immediately start crying on the spot, unable to explain the feelings even between catching my breath in between sobbing.
I also did that living nearly 500 miles away from all my closest friends and family, so that added a component of loneliness to it. But it also forced me to dig in my roots deep to make some new connections that could support me and that I could rely on to help me get through that time of my life.
Man. Yes, so much growth happened then. But it was very painful. Even then, I knew that the most painful thing I’d ever done at that point, would end up being the best thing. And that hope kept me going. It was a dark time for a while.
Lucky for me, most of this happened in 2020–so staying home and being in a cocoon felt natural. I was so depressed. I didn’t have enough energy to also be stressed about the pandemic, so it actually ended up being a good rebuilding year for me.
That was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through, hands down. Until about 2 ½ years later when that relationship ending got pushed off the leaderboard of hardest things earlier this year in a way I would never have suspected.
Leaving my job at the pinnacle of my career
The new hardest thing I’d gone through was the mental breakdown that led me to quit my job this year. Again, if I fast forward to the end, I can tell you the story has a happy ending. But in the moment, I didn’t know that it would have a happy ending, I thought this was the end, the beginning of an eternal downhill, never rebounding.
In short, by this point in April of 2022 (almost 2 ½ years later after leaving that relationship and rebuilding my life), life is looking pretty good. I’m comfortable where I am in life. I've healed from the breakup, I've processed, I've grown, I’ve even been in a few new relationships by now. At this point I also have a girlfriend, which blows my mind because it’s the healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in. It’s all a breath of fresh air, and it feels great.
I was also at the pinnacle of my career. I’d spent 2021 working tirelessly to improve my coaching, communication, and leadership skills as a Business Coach at the agency I was working at. That was in December 2021, when I’d finally felt like all that hard paid off when I was promoted to the highest client-facing role in the company, and I was one of the first women to do so. That also opened up me earning more money than I’d ever made before. I was 29 and making six figures. Holy shit!
Life was good. I loved having enough money to pay off my debt, plan trips for me and my girlfriend, and to take us out to dinner without worrying about whether I have enough money to also buy an appetizer or dessert.
Come early April, four months into my new role, I was already feeling extremely burnt out. I was exhausted and felt like I was always just trying to keep up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t even being myself anymore. I was becoming this person the company needed me to be, that was in opposition to some of my core values as a person. So mentally, I was working really hard every moment of the workday to be someone else, and the thing is (remember those strong denial mechanisms of mine I talked about), I told myself everything was fine.
In fact, I told myself I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else. On company surveys, I’d constantly rate my experience an 8 or a 9, and I really believed it.
Meanwhile, I was having trouble sleeping. I’d be so wound up and thought of clients and the work I had to do that it made it hard for me to ever unwind and fall asleep. I didn’t know how to relax. On days when I actually would take lunch, I’d be going for a walk and obsessing about the rest of the things I had to get done that day. At the end, I didn’t even have energy or motivation for the things that I loved doing anymore.
I just called all that “working really hard at my new role.”
My doctor called it “depression.”
I didn’t realize at the time how unhealthy this was. I automatically made it my fault, that it must be me being bad at my job that I need to work this hard to keep up. Meanwhile, the praise and recognition I got made it so confusing. I felt like I was always sinking, meanwhile everyone was saying, “Great job, here’s a few things to keep working on, but you’re doing great.”
Talk about another mindfuck.
The thing that’s different about this time versus the breakup I talked about earlier is that the romantic relationship involved a conscious choice to walk away. That’s not what happened this time.
This time, at work, I had a panic attack. I was sitting at my computer and I couldn't breathe. My body was finally waving the white flag (because my conscious self wouldn't do it because I was still convinced everything was fine) and said enough is enough. That breakdown prompted me to take 3 months of leave from work. It was the hardest time of my life.
Everyone would tell me how awesome it sounds to have 3 months off of work, meanwhile, I was in the deepest depression I’ve ever been in.
I couldn't get out of bed. Brushing my teeth was a big feat for the day, nevermind actually taking Luca out for a walk. I had no energy for any of it. I felt so emotionally, mentally, and spiritually dead. I had no energy to talk to people. And I thought for sure this was the end of my career that I’d just been celebrating. And besides the end of my career, I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. Me, the energetic, happy and high on life, bubbly people person, she was gone and I didn’t know if I’d ever find her again. It was a really scary time.
All of a sudden, my therapist, who I'd been working with for 2 years before this, would end every session asking me if I’ve had any thoughts about harming myself. That’s how much of a different person I’d become. This was not the Jolié anyone knew.
That was a wake-up call that, “Wow, this really is bad. And I need help. Something has got to change.”
Fast forward, in that 3-month time period, I also experienced the end of that romantic relationship, along with witnessing the deterioration of someone I cared deeply about who had ALS, and her eventually passing away.
There was a lot of grief, a lot of loss. That was a rough time.
So yea, that topped the hardest time for me. The hardest aspect of it was the unknown of what would happen, if I'd ever be okay again, and not feeling like I had any control. I felt so lost.
I also made it through that time without getting high, and without sacrificing my principles. In other words, I didn’t lash out or self-destruct or hurt others in any way that I regret or that’s against my values. I was able to learn and grow and feel the pain and heal and process it with dignity. That’s really important to me.
It’s in those hard moments that you really see who someone is. You see their true colors, and the deepest aspects of their character. And the fact that even in my darkest and lowest points, I don’t look to cause harm to make myself feel better makes me really proud of myself.
I aim to share more about the specifics of how I got through that time, but really it was the same skills I’d learned from before. Talk to people. Open up. Let people help you. Let people love you. Grieve, let the feelings out. Process them out loud and on paper whenever possible. Focus on just the bare minimum to get through the day, and celebrate it when you do.
I can now say that each of those hard times opened up a new chapter for me that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.
The ending of that romantic relationship led me to finally know myself in a way I’d never known before. Now, I have self-confidence, self-worth, and a strong sense of who I am and what’s important to me in my life.
And without developing those things, there’s no way I would have even had the opportunity to get that promotion. And if I didn’t have that breakdown from that promotion, I never would have prioritized my physical and mental health the way I do today. I wouldn't have realized I wasn’t living my truth in my work. And I wouldn't have had the courage (or desperation) to start my own business and do work that felt authentic and genuine to myself.
So looking back, I wouldn't trade any of those hard times. They’ve made me so much stronger, and ready for whatever is coming next.
Now I hope for even bigger problems, harder times
Those were the hardest times up until now.
I keep adding that disclaimer because I’m sure there will be new hard moments. I kind of hope so. It means I’m growing. It means I’m not having the same problems over and over again. I’m going through them, learning from them, and then being able to have bigger problems.
I know that sounds wild to say. But I want hard times that will take the best of me, and force me to grow and evolve into an even better version of myself. I have big dreams and big plans for my life, and if I’m not scared and facing potentially big hard decisions and hard times, it means I’m not pushing hard enough towards creating what’s really important to me.
Also, the cool thing about having bigger problems is that all the small stuff doesn’t really make me sweat anymore. I don’t get mad when people cut me off in traffic, or if someone is rude to me at the store. I have bigger problems to worry about to help bring some hope to the people I’m around. So that’s a perk, too.
Back to the analogy of lifting weights, you don’t get stronger without building muscle. And you build the muscle by breaking it down and then rebuilding it even stronger. Sometimes that means you’ll be sore. Sometimes you’ll need some time to rest and recover. You won’t hit a PR every single time at the gym.
But if you’re in it for the long haul, that’s the way to truly get better and to feel good while you’re doing it.