Riding Out the Storm: Finding Strength in Life’s Hardest Moments

On the surface, my life is pretty good, great even. I’m incredibly privileged, with three beautiful children, a loving husband, a flexible, meaningful job, great friends. 

But sometimes I feel like I’m drowning.

Not the thrashing, panicked, violent kind of drowning. Rather, like I am fighting a rip tide day after day, treading water, working so very hard just to stay afloat, weary to the bone—drowning almost imperceptibly. Silently. Drifting further and further from shore as I struggle to summon another surge of energy and intention to swim harder, longer, faster—all to no avail. Melodramatic, I know, but accurate in the moment for this Enneagram 4.

Recently, I’ve felt that way a lot, as if the endless demands of everyday life are tied like lead weights, heavy and immovable, to my ankle: making lunches, changing diapers, grading papers, sweeping floors, cooking dinner, figuring out what to cook for dinner, calming children, playing their games, ignoring whining, blocking out the baby’s cries in the car, refereeing sibling squabbles, putting out fires—both literal and metaphorical. Even if some of the tasks are relatively enjoyable, they are still demands, obligations, expectations, and their weight can be exhausting, overwhelming.

And there are no breaks, no vacations, not even a night off to go out on a date these days. The demands are relentless: I am needed nearly every waking moment it seems, and if others are momentarily satisfied, then it’s time for me to work on the projects I have put in place for myself—writing, reading, exercising, showering—you know, all the luxuries I try to squeeze in every once in a while. When showering feels like too much trouble, too much to fit into a packed day, that’s not a good sign, right?

In short, it’s not healthy. It’s not sustainable. I’m living without margin, and that means than any unexpected additional challenge feels apocalyptic. And life is always throwing unexpected obstacles in our way; that’s just how it goes.

So I want to escape; I want things to be easier; I want life to somehow just stop being so darn difficult—the children to behave, the baby to sleep through the night, our health to be perfect, my chronic pain to cease, my classes to run perfectly, the house to clean itself or at least not need any repairs. And each time one of these things doesn’t happen, I’m annoyed, exasperated.

Somewhere along the way I seem to have forgotten that having three kids five and under while working 30 hours a week, writing and editing on the side, and supporting my husband through a PhD program while he also works full time and edits on the side would be rather A LOT to handle.

Somehow I convinced myself that it would be fine, that we’d be able to make it work without sacrificing our mental or physical health, that we’d be busy, sure, but, you know, fine.

So I keep being surprised when I find myself feeling like I’m barely keeping my head above water, battling wave after wave, enjoying only the briefest glimpses of blue sky before being pounded under by another wall of water.

Embracing the Struggle

But I should not be surprised. This is a HARD season. On so many levels.

There’s nothing catastrophic for me personally as there is for so many in the world, and for this I am daily grateful. But that doesn’t make it easier—in fact, in many ways that only makes it harder, because, on top of everything else, now feel guilty about feeling down when I should be feeling thankful.

We could always have it worse than we do, and it’s good to keep this in mind. But hard is hard. As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes, the experience of suffering cannot be compared to another’s: it is always and by definition absolute.

But there is a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is a sensation, one we cannot avoid in this life and generally cannot control. Suffering, in contrast, is our reaction to that pain and therefore is entirely within our control. Suffering occurs when we feel we are experiencing pain unjustly, unnecessarily, and seemingly unendingly. We can choose to let the inevitable pain of life produce suffering, or we can accept that pain as a reliable if unwelcome companion on this journey—and stop being surprised and indignant when it shows its face once more.

As Frankl writes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

The words of Emma Thompson in Love Actually keep coming to mind. Toward the beginning, she tells the grieving Liam Neeson who has recently lost his wife, “It was always going to be a totally sh*t time. Just be patient.”

These words are oddly comforting. They succinctly remind me that there was no possible universe in which this stage of our lives was going to be easy. Covid has added an extra layer of complication and general crappiness for sure, but there was never a scenario in which we would sail serenely through this season. Having three young kids at once is just gonna be challenging no matter how you slice it.

And, this time has not been “totally” crappy. There have been and will continue to be lots of sweet, funny, cute, meaningful, and even peaceful times—well, only a few of those last ones. So I try to take each one of those as a gift, a ray of sunshine piercing through the cloud cover. And those bright spots give me the strength to keep swimming.

But it also helps to remember that, for the most part, these storms are not unexpected. They are not unusual for the season or even particularly large. When I set out on this journey, this is what the guidebooks predicted.

A friend recently shared this quote from a fortune cookie (and before you read it, let’s just acknowledge that it is super obnoxious that fortune cookies so often do not offer fortunes but rather offer witticisms or clichés—can we just call them cliché cookies?), and it’s stuck with me as apt for this year:

Calm seas do not produce skilled sailors.

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one navigating rough seas right now: I’m guessing most of you have been working pretty hard to stay afloat recently too for one reason or another.

So here’s to us. We CAN do this. Even though we might feel like we’re going to drown sometimes—like we can’t swim another stroke, like we would give our right foot for just a few days away from everything—we will find the strength to keep going. We will have moments here and there when the waves calm enough that we can float, letting the seas hold us, gazing up at the bulbous clouds, glimpsing the blue sky beyond, remembering the reasons we embarked on this adventure in the first place.

And throughout it all, we are honing skills that we may not even be aware of, skills that will shape us more into the people we were created to be. While I might feel sometimes like I would rather pass on those particular skills and just enjoy a leisurely sail, that would not ultimately bring me the fulfillment I seek.

God is strengthening and sustaining us, even if we can’t feel it. And, most likely, it won’t always be this hard.

No storm lasts forever.