It Doesn't Have to Be This Hard

Lisbon, Portugal

Yesterday, during EMDR therapy, I casually mentioned something to my brain therapist. My last body therapy appointment had been comfortable. Not tolerable. Not something I survived. Actually comfortable. Calming. Relaxing.

This was unusual. For a long time, body therapy has meant something very different to me. I have found myself in hysterics. I have fought back tears. I have experienced immense amounts of pain. This has happened during different kinds of treatment—body work, lymphatic massage, acupuncture. Somewhere along the way, I developed an expectation that working with my body was supposed to be difficult.

I had done EMDR not long after my accident. At that time, I had very little ability to calm my nervous system. I was also living with extreme amounts of pain. More than five years later, I am coming to this therapy with a different body. Not an uninjured body, and not a body without trauma, but a body in which I have more power. I understand my nervous system much more now. I recognize things I could not recognize then.

So when I told my therapist about this unexpectedly peaceful body therapy appointment, she said something very simple: it doesn't have to be that way. My immediate response was resistance. How can you deny my experience? Because my experience had been that way. It had been painful. It had been overwhelming. I wasn't inventing that history.

But that wasn't what she was saying. She was asking me to consider why I had begun to believe that because something had been difficult before, it necessarily had to continue being difficult. She explained that the brain attaches itself to narratives. An experience happens. Then it happens again. The narrative is reinforced, and reinforced again, until eventually we stop experiencing it as a narrative at all. It simply becomes the way things are.

Body work is painful. Trauma work is devastating. Recovery is hard. Because I am working with trauma held in my body, some part of me had come to believe that the process itself needed to be traumatizing.

That realization stopped me, because once I started thinking about this pattern, I recognized it immediately: it needs to be hard to count. That story did not begin with my brain injury.

I grew up with a father who was a first-generation Sicilian American, and in many ways I inherited from him a particular way of moving through the world: you go hard. As a teenager, I rebelled against it. Or at least I thought I did. But even my rebellion contained it. I went hard socially. I partied hard. I wanted lots of friends, lots of experiences, lots happening all the time. And when I became an adult, I carried the same intensity into work. The idea of living well became associated with doing as much as possible: having multiple jobs, making money, going out, knowing people, filling time.

There were repercussions, of course, but there were also rewards. When I eventually moved from Boston to New York City, it felt completely natural. Boston had begun to feel too small for me. New York seemed like a place built around a language I already understood: more, faster, harder, hustle. And I was good at it.

When I got what I considered my dream jobs in broadcasting, working at Time Warner, HBO, and CNN, the pressure did not feel strange to me. In some strange way, I felt at ease inside it. You worked incredibly hard even to receive positive feedback, and I wanted that feedback. I strived for it. This was also during an economic crash, and the precarity was constantly made clear to us. Hundreds and hundreds of people wanted our jobs; we should be grateful to have them. The message underneath was obvious: don't complain. You are replaceable. Work harder. And in my father's eyes, I had finally become successful.

Of course, that kind of working cannot continue indefinitely. There were days when I worked 12 hours without earning more because I had worked more. I gave more of myself to a system, but the financial benefit of that extra labor wasn't mine. The companies benefited from our dedication and devotion. The people at the top benefited. At the time, though, I wasn't spending much energy thinking about who benefited from my willingness to push myself that hard. I was too busy doing it. Within a few years, I found myself dealing with depression and what I would later understand as burnout.

Today, I am no longer physically capable of participating in the hustle mindset in the way I once did. My brain injury and chronic health problems have made that impossible. But apparently, hustle mentality didn't leave my body just because I could no longer participate in it. I carried it into recovery. I carried the same logic into rehabilitation, healthcare, and trauma work: work harder, push harder, don't stop, get better.

This has served me in many ways. Giving up is not part of my vocabulary, and over the past five years there have been many moments when giving up would have been understandable. Handling healthcare in Germany as a foreigner, a BIPOC person, and a disabled person has required an enormous amount of persistence. I have encountered systems that are broken, inaccessible, and frequently lacking in compassion. There have been times when getting care has itself felt like another job—another thing I have had to fight for. And generally, even after the worst days, I wake up the next morning, brush the dirt off my behind and get up again, ready to fight.

There is something powerful in that. I don't want to erase the part of me that keeps getting back up. But I am beginning to wonder what happens when fighting becomes the only way I know how to recognize progress. What happens when difficulty itself becomes evidence that I am doing something correctly? What happens when pain becomes proof of commitment?

Yesterday, I was reminded that my brain tells stories. That does not mean those stories are imaginary. They are built from real experiences. They are built from repetition, family, work, trauma, culture, and survival. But a story can be true to our past without dictating our future.

And this is where my private experience begins to feel much less private. Because it needs to be hard is not simply a story inside my brain. It is everywhere. We are taught to admire people who push through. We reward productivity, endurance, and sacrifice. We ask how much someone accomplished, how hard they worked, how quickly they recovered. We often understand suffering as evidence of seriousness: if you really want something, you will fight for it. If you really care, you will sacrifice. If you are really committed, you will do the work.

But who benefits when we believe that pushing ourselves to our limits is simply what responsible, successful people do? Who benefits when tiredness becomes normal? When I worked 12-hour days without being paid more for those hours, was I really the one benefiting from my willingness to go hard? And when we are so busy working, pushing, and surviving that we barely have the energy to question the system we are participating in, who does that serve? If my body has learned that pain equals progress, where did that lesson come from? What might become possible if I allowed myself to imagine something else?

These questions feel especially important to me now because disability has forced me outside of this system in many ways. My body will not allow me to perform productivity the way I once did. I cannot always push through. Sometimes pushing makes things worse. Sometimes stopping is the productive thing. Sometimes resting is the work.

And perhaps this is where what I am learning through EMDR reaches beyond therapy. If I can begin to imagine recovery with ease, I can begin to imagine a different relationship with my body altogether. I can even begin to imagine a different relationship with work, productivity, and success.

Healing does not always have to hurt. A therapy session can be gentle and still be doing something. Leaving an appointment calm does not mean I failed to go deep enough. Ease is not evidence that I didn't work hard enough. And maybe ease does not have to be something I earn only after I have exhausted myself.

I don't know yet what it means to believe this fully. A narrative built over a lifetime does not disappear because someone points it out during one therapy appointment. But awareness creates an interruption. Yesterday, for a moment, I could see the story while it was being told. And once I could see it as a story, another possibility appeared.

It doesn't have to be this hard.