“Hard day at preschool, Emma?” I joked.
She looked up with an expression of innocence and exhaustion, “Preschool was really, really hard today.”
I laughed under my breath. If only she knew; it gets so, so much harder. I sighed too.
Emma is one of the tiny ballerinas in a dance class that I help teach. Every week, she gives me a smile and a hug before we sit in a circle to stretch. But yesterday she had an off-day. We’ve all been there.
On my ride home from the dance studio, my mind wandered back to what Emma had said: “Preschool was really, really hard today.”
The fact is, sometimes life is hard, whether you’re in preschool or a retirement community. And maybe my life of juggling AP classes, tennis, clubs, dance, church, and relationships is harder than Emma’s playdates and picture books, but that doesn’t invalidate Emma’s experiences.
The reality is, your personal circumstances could always be more difficult than they currently are. Maybe my life is harder than Emma’s right now, but undoubtedly, there are millions of people with lives harder than mine. Knowing this, I used to tell myself to suck it up and put on a brave face. I deeply believed that talking openly about my struggles was a display of entitlement because other people had it harder and struggled more than I could imagine. I thought that by owning my difficulties I was somehow devaluing the hardships of others.
As I’ve matured, I’ve come to realize the importance of openly owning my struggles. Only through honesty about my failures can I heal and grow from my shortcomings. I refuse to allow my mistakes to define who am I, and by sharing my difficulties I take the power away from my inadequacies. It’s no longer about what I’m not, but who I could be. In owning my struggles, I have found freedom and hope.
So, sweet Emma is right after all. Sometimes preschool is really, really hard. And that’s okay.
I love this. I can relate when you said that you used to think that expressing your difficulties was sort of self absorbed because so many other people had it worse than you, but just like you I then realized that expressing and talking about it can help not only you but others as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'm ever going through what I think is a hard time, I like to put my life in perspective and think about how fortunate I am to have the life that I do have.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, and I think that it is important to realize that while not everyone has the same struggles, people should still discuss their own issues with others to allow themselves to grow and push through them. I believe that this is an important way to deal with struggles because it is more positive as opposed to suppressing and invalidating my issues because they are not as bad as someone else's.
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