The Struggle in the Journey

I’ve been reading the works of Andrew Solomon lately and I followed up by listening to interviews with him on NPR as well as his TED talks.  I find his work thoughtful and his ideas are the sort that I keep coming back to because they are so useful in my work with children and their families.

I’ve a well-rehearsed talk that I have with a child most every week of the school year.  The talk can be neatly summarized: “Everyone has a hard journey.”  This is neither a mind-glowingly erudite command of human behavior nor something that no one else understands.  In fact, as soon as the idea comes up the children in my care nod knowingly because their life feels hard at times as well and to acknowledge the struggle is to at once make it easier to bear.  The trick of course, is to remind ourselves that everyone experiences struggle, even when we can’t see it.

The idea was driven home to me some years ago when B, a popular, athletic, good-looking student needed my help on an essay he intended to submit with a college application.  School was sometimes hard for B and while his outward appearance would suggest that he had not a care in the world, he was anxious and struggling.  In our discussion about his essay he blurted out, “This would be so much easier if I were like H.”

As it turned out, I was also in the business that year of helping H, whose life  contained its own struggles.  H was whip smart; school came easy to him and he knew it.  But his group of friends was smaller and he wasn’t athletic; he didn’t feel particularly good-looking.  In some of our far-ranging talks about life he had allowed that life would be better if he were just like B.

The fact that these two were actually struggling within sight of one another was, of course, lost to them.  Our world sometimes has that sort of tunnel vision.  I provided reassurance to both young men and without revealing their identity to one another assured them that we all struggle; that no one’s journey is as simple and easy as it might seem to an outside observer.

In my own life, I’ve come to believe that it’s the struggles that reveal who we are and what we can be.  I’m aware that some of us can’t overcome our struggles and that seems like the greatest of tragedies.  I believe that it is in the act of overcoming that we find the measure not just of who we are but also who we can be.