The Metric of Struggle
The other day, I was having an interesting chat about support animals with a trusted friend who’s got his shit together way more than I do. He had heard something about a woman with a therapy goat, a notion so preposterous to him that it catapulted him into a rant about how ineffective and useless any service animal is, boiling it down to nothing more than a ridiculous privilege that wealthier countries get to enjoy. He insisted that all it does is promote more weakness to those born into privilege, as people living under much worse circumstances were able were able to live happy lives in spite of the fact that they had inherently more adversity to overcome with virtually no outlets like therapy or service animals to aid them.
Parts of me agreed with him. Growing up in New England, it’s in my nature to be hard nosed about these things and champion concepts like mental toughness, equality over equity, and the reality of one’s own situation. In this scenario, it’s probably fair to say that the reality of someone who does have a support animal, is that they have an infinitely more comfortable living and financial environment than the person living in a third world country who is able to live happily in spite of the fact that they have no money and live in life-threatening circumstances on a daily basis. While this is indisputable fact, it’s also not the full picture.
Nearly all judgement and assessment towards others is derived from how we perceive their outer circumstances. As we all know, however, there is much more to us than meets the eye, so why is it that we have such a difficult time implementing the same patience onto others? All of the experience that we’ve had has lead us to where we are right now. It is impossible to grasp the weight of this even within ourselves and our own lives, so how can we be expected to grasp it when considering the lives of others? We can’t, which is precisely why this kind of judgment is invalid.
Let’s look at an example. If I said that Person A. is crying over losing $5000 and Person B. is crying over losing $5, most listeners would be quick to say that Person B. is overreacting and doesn’t have as much to cry about as Person A. Pretty simple. A seemingly reasonable assessment has been made based on next to no information. But what if Person A. is a billionaire and Person B. is a homeless veteran who only had $5 and now has nothing? What if Person B. is a child who made the first and only $5 of their life at their lemonade stand? What if Person B. acquired that $5 bill from a deceased loved one and it had great sentimental value to them? The list goes on, and all of a sudden people start to change their opinions as more information comes in. But hey, what if Person B. was the person who acquired the bill from a deceased loved one, but now you find out that they were also going to spend that $5 on a knife that they would use to kill innocent people? Popular opinion then switches back. Around and around we go.
In the case of those with service animals vs those who don’t have the same luxuries, the same principle does indeed apply. Each party has been conditioned differently and therefore the same happening is bound to inflict a very different amount of pain. Or for this example, very different happenings are bound to inflict the same amount of pain.
If walking through a crowd of people causes severe anxiety for Person A., and being held at gunpoint causes the exact same amount of anxiety for Person B., we must resist the temptation to get into a dick measuring contest and instead turn our focus towards how to remedy each person’s anxiety, regardless of the fact that on the outside, Person A. seems to have it a lot easier. Building up someone’s toughness or tolerance is a follow-up concern and therefore a separate conversation.
The back half of my friend’s argument was that the act of having an animal for therapy is ineffective, citing not only that it allows people an opportunity to deflect their problems onto an animal rather than learning to absorb it themselves but also that the people in need of a therapy animals only continues to go up rather than diminish, indicating a lack of overall improvement.
What’s missing here is the value of experimentation and action, which boils down to momentum more often than outer results. If having a therapy animal succeeds in dramatically improving someone else’s health, that’s fantastic. If it doesn’t, however, it is likely that the person who experimented with having a therapy animal will still feel a sense of improvement from taking that step, which is a different form of progress (it’s not as identifiable to the naked eye), but it’s progress nonetheless. We need progress to feel happy, and progress is birthed by action, whether or not that action accomplishes what it initially set out to.
This, too, is a reflection of improper judgment. What one might deem as a lack of outer success (so in this case, relying on an animal to absorb pain and the amount of anxiety cases continuing to increase) may still be a showing of inner success (people creating momentum for themselves and being more apt to pursuing paths that will eventually bring them outer success). Not to mention any number of extraneous circumstances that aren’t being recognized (like maybe overall anxiety spiking due to other reasons whilst people that have therapy animals are indeed improving). Depending on where you get your information from, you’ll hear different sides of the story, because like you, your information sources are also incapable of fully grasping all the intricacies that make any situation what it is.
So in conclusion, try being as understanding of others as you are of yourself, and do not feel you need to bear the burden of knowing all there is to know, because you can’t. And it is in this very surrender that you’ll find a massive weight lifted from your shoulders. We each have different paths, and thus have different definitions of struggle, and it is more imperative that we take the proper measures to find joy than it is for us to be compared to others
