When Life Hurts, What Can You Do?

“Hi.”

Violet walks into the room with her sunglasses on, and a coffee gripped tightly in her hand. She sits on the couch and turns her head towards the window. For one, two, three beats. It’s almost as if she is waiting for the rain to stop before she decides to pull down her sunglasses and look at me.

It doesn’t stop. It taps the roof and drips down the windows, backlit by the gray sky. She inhales, pushes her glasses onto the top of her head, and rubs her eyes.

It’s clear she’s been crying.

“It hurts,” she says as she continues to look out the window; her red and puffy eyes are a clear contrast to her chapped and pale lips.

“What does?” I respond.

“Life.”

I nod my head and sit silently. For one, two, three, four… I’ve been taught if you wait at least 10 seconds, you usually don’t have to say much at all to get someone to keep talking. Silence can be golden.

Violet continues. “That’s dramatic, I know,” she says, “but it all hurts right now. What do I do?”

What do I do?

That’s the question people ask most in my office.

What do I do to move on?

What do I do to get them back?

What do I do to get them to listen to me?

What do I do to get my life on track?

Well, there are many answers to each of these questions, depending on who you ask. Ask your best friend how to move on, and they recommend their favorite book. Ask your parent, and they tell you to get busy. Neither is right or wrong. In fact, both are right. They are things that you do.

But if you’re asking, “What do I do that can ensure my pain goes away?” The answer is sometimes…nothing.

I understand the wanting to do something. Sometimes, I look around at my job and my house, which seems to need endless repairs, and my kids and my husband, and I think, “What can I do to balance this all? What can I do to make this all work?”

But doing often just keeps us busy. And sometimes, during an initial moment of crisis, that is what we all need. But then, doing becomes doing for doing’s sake. All you’re doing is standing in the road, kicking the can further and further towards the horizon, with no end in sight, whispering to yourself, “I guess this is what I can do.”

I tilt my head and say to Violet, “What if there is nothing to do? At least right now?”

What if you have to sit with it?

When you’re in pain, despair, or you’re just flat-out overwhelmed, the illusion of control is alluring. Often, though, we don’t have it. Even when you decide what to do, you can’t predict the outcome. You truly don’t have control over what happens most of the time.

Violet looks at me. “I don’t think there is anything I can do. But I want to. I want to know how to fix it all. But I don’t think I can”.

Instead of asking, “What can I do?” I wonder what would happen if Violet started asking, “How can I learn to see what happens?”

“What you can do,” I say, “is learn how to be present with yourself, even when it’s hard.”

In the end…

• During life’s most trying moments—grief, confusion, stress—there is often nothing we can actively do to remove the pain. Reading more books, keeping busy, or having one more conversation might not be the salve to heal your soul.
• Instead of looking for more actions to take, be willing to stay still.
• Practice telling yourself, “Let’s see what happens next.”
• Breathe in and out with your hand on your chest, reminding yourself that you’re in pain, but you’ve got this. You can sit with hard feelings. As Glennon Doyle says, “You can do hard things.”