Learn To Endure
“How tough am I?” is a question that a young me was obsessed with. Traumatic childhood events led me to believe I was weak, broken, flawed in some way. As I grew older and found myself a little I got into sports, my teen years filled with a fine balance of 3 different sports (hurling, Gaelic Football and rugby) and my nerdier life of wargaming and comics. When I went to college at 18 I was far more physically able than I had ever been, but still the question remained, “How tough am I?”.
To help pay the bills and get through college I did dangerous jobs in a dangerous place, dealing on a daily basis with dangerous people. I was hurt, sometimes seriously. A part of me longed for those moments of confrontation, those times and places where normal people have enough sense to be scared and act out of self preservation. Looking back on it I just wanted to find the fight I could lose, the “tragic incident” that might kill me. I boxed, did Muay Thai kickboxing, later MMA and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I lifted weights and became incredibly strong. I was deceptively fast, ensuring I kept the speed I had possessed as a small kid even when I was a 250lb, 6 foot 2 inch tall monster. I was sculpting myself into what I saw as a being a strong person. Had I less authority issues I probably would have joined the Army but my brothers time in the Armed Forces let me know I wasn’t the type. We can’t all be all things and I wasn’t the kind of guy to take orders. It’s important to know your limits.
I did things that tested my physical and mental toughness. I jumped at the chance to experience temperatures of -150 degree Celsius, happy to stand there in my underwear just to see if I could. I did weight lifting triathlons, lifting iron nonstop for HOURS just to see if I would quit. I competed in everything that would let me enter, just to see if I could do things or if I would walk away when it got hard and the pain became unbearable.
Arriving in my late twenties I had no idea yet if I was tough or not, I just knew I had been able to do the things I tried to do. Despite being oddly self obsessed I was also self aware enough to know that, outside of my very earliest childhood I had never really been tested, life hadn’t thrown any real shit in my direction, at the very least nothing I hadn’t invited. And then the tests began.
Headaches, brutal headaches that hurt so much I thought my skull was changing shape beneath my fingers as I clutched my head. Pains in my ears and jaws, stomach and intestines. Fear and anxiety, constant and irrational and cutting. A pain in my neck so bad I thought my head was sure to just pop off at any moment. My joints swollen to the point that movement was agony, my skin red and raw, almost burned from god knows what. No sleep, no food, slowly but surely wasting away. Nightmares, hallucinations, disassociation, panics attacks 3 or 4 times a day. A crippling fear of the outside world to the point where even trying to open the front door felt like my dead was being crushed in a vice.
This article isn’t about what was wrong with me, or why, or how I fixed so much of it and how I AM fixing the rest. This article is about what I learned over those brutal years, the most important piece of advice I can give to anyone who is suffering physical or mental pain, who feels like they cannot go on.
Learn to endure.
Our number one survival trait, as a species, is our simple ability to put up with our reality. We can endure and survive the most horrible of things, it is hard-coded into us after millions of years of having to do just that as a species. This is not to say we do not suffer doubts, we do, of course we do. But doubts are things that we must overcome in order to possess a self belief that is true and worthwhile. Strength, untested, is merely assumed.
When I was deep in a pit of depression and obsessed with the idea of suicide I repeatedly told myself “just one more day”. If I could get through today, I could wake up tomorrow and have a whole fresh day to work with. An entire day to examine and think, experiment and try. I just had to endure. Slowly, glacially I found causes for my problems, found methods and people who could help me, found the strength inside to help myself. Slowly but surely I got better, to the point where I am now planning to get married in a year and a half and absolutely BELIEVE that I can do the work required between now and then to fully enjoy what will be the happiest day of my life.
That ability to endure was something I didn’t know I had until I needed it, and was probably something that I didn’t have until I was given a reason to forge it deep within myself. And you can do it to. I’m neither gifted, nor special, I just wanted to live. After years of thinking I wanted out, when faced with the very real possibility of experiencing so much pain that I would kill myself something in me clicked and I decided that there was nothing that I couldn’t endure in order to keep those things that, to me, were so important. And you can do that too, you can endure. Just make it to tomorrow, then the day after that. Eventually you will be stronger than you ever imagined.
I don’t ask myself if I am tough anymore, I already know the answer.
I just endure.
