When You Feel Like You’ve Got Nothing Left to Give
Pain is important: how we evade it,
how we succumb to it, how we deal with it,
how we transcend it.
—Audre Lorde
» THE night before I checked into rehab found me resorting to childish tactics. On the floor, wailing like a character in a Greek tragedy, begging my girlfriend to let me stay. But I couldn’t stay. I had stolen from her, been untrue, relapsed a dozen times, and, frankly, my life was in danger. It was rehab or the street: that was her tough-love ultimatum. But I was terrified of the uncertainty I was about to step into. I was terrified I’d fail. Cocaine and heroin had become my entire world, a cozy hell, and I was certain I didn’t have what it took to climb out of the hole I had dug for myself. I was also certain I had to at least try.
The next day, I walked into rehab and immediately took a seat next to the front door, hoping no one would notice me. A man walked up to me and smiled: “Don’t you worry, whiteboy. You’re gonna be just fine.” I later learned about this man’s previous career robbing people at gunpoint in hotel elevators. More importantly, I came to know the decent person underneath all that. He had simply known a deeper desperation than I did because his trauma was just that severe. It was the same with everyone in there: whether they had been sex workers, pimps, thieves, gangbangers, tweakers, needle junkies, crack smokers, drunks…we were all utterly human, had been wrung through the wringer of life, and spit out on this side of things. Addiction is the derivative of trauma and tragedy. Every time. I came to know and love the humanity I saw in each one of us. I was transformed by it. I then took advantage of the opportunity to engage in intensive therapy, to throw myself deeply into meditation, and to do the work to heal.
Sorting out my life seemed impossible. I was certain I didn’t have what it took, and it was all excruciating at first. Yet, none of those things mattered in the end. I found a way to stay in the game.
But life wasn’t done teaching me this lesson that it tries fervently to teach us all. Out of rehab, I felt a deep calling to become a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and yoga instructor—to find a way to integrate these things that had been given to me and offer them back to the world. This meant starting community college at the age of thirty with no money, no help from family, 100 percent on student loans, while still very much dealing with an active depression and trauma-related dysfunctional behavior patterns. One part of me knew I could pull it off. That part of me told me that we’d just take it one thing at a time, one day at a time. Just like rehab, it’d be hard, it’d seem like forever, we’d get through it, and it’d be worth it in the end. Other parts of me screamed loudly that the endeavor was impossible—it was too big, too audacious, and there were too many obstacles. One part liked to add that I was a junkie loser who’d never accomplished anything. But then I’d come back to the part of me that said, “Just do the next thing. All you have to do now is whatever’s right in front of you.” It was the quieter of the two voices, and I often had to go looking for it, but I learned I could rely on that voice. How curious that the more tender voice was the one that helped me to persist through difficulty. Rather than the harshness of self-aggression, ambition, and “powering through”—the voice that had always led me straight back to the needle—the voice of tenderness suggested that I really could do what I wanted to do, and that the way to do it was one step at a time.
Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned in school came from the way these themes repeated each and every finals season. Twice a year for six years, I’d be sitting with a pile of work that felt insurmountable. It seemed like I’d literally have to find a way to bend space-time in order to accomplish it all. I’d look at my classmates who had money from their parents, who were younger and more resilient than me, who didn’t hold a lifetime of hurt and addiction in their bones—they all seemed so cut out for this, but not me. Certainly not me. But then that other voice in me would chime in, “All you have to do is write the next sentence. Read the next page. Breathe through one more hour. Smoke a damn cigarette if you must. But just keep going. It will end. And when it ends you will have proved something to yourself.”
The essence of these stories is not unique to me. Anytime life backs us into a corner and we choose rising over recoiling, we are met with voices that scream, “I can’t even! I don’t have what it takes. That’s for other people who have it better. It feels impossible. It’s too painful, too much sacrifice. I’m gonna blow it and I’m not sure I can face that.” But we all simultaneously hear a whisper, a quieter and calmer voice that says something akin to “Oh, but you can. You just need to find a way to take the next step. And then the one after that. It’s just time to get resourceful. It’s just time to summon your resilience. That’s all.”
The voice we heed is the voice that will get stronger.
GIVE UP OR GET UP
What convincingly feels impossible is often utterly possible. It simply entails failure and the kind of tenacity required to transcend failure. The idea of failure is agonizing for many of us. Failure convincingly feels like a confirmation that we are no good, undeserving, outcasts. Those voices are parts of us that either want to see us do better or are so freaked out by the vulnerability involved in going after our best lives that they’re willing to assail us in an effort to keep us from trying. One option is to simply turn to those voices and say, “Thanks so much for taking care of me.” Despite obvious appearances, that’s what those voices are actually trying to do.
Notice that I’m lifting up a different model of tenacity here. Not the self-negating, hypermasculine, “no pain no gain” kind of stick-to-itiveness so often preached in our society. That kind of tenacity often entails shoving our feelings aside, which is dehumanizing and objectifying. I’m talking about a more tender kind of tenacity that is, in so many ways, the stronger and more courageous choice. It’s the choice to allow our fears and freak-outs to be present so that we can relate to them. In situations where we are working at the very edge of what we think is possible, we can show these parts something incredibly valuable: that it’s okay to be afraid, it’s okay to fail, it’s okay if it hurts, it’s okay if we are humbled by it all. It’s okay because we bounce back, we’re resilient. We are built for such things.
So often, the feeling of failure is the sensation of growth. Seeing this is an invitation to reframe our relationship to failure. Personally, I’ve come to aim for failure. Failure, I’ve found, is actually the fastest path to self-actualization. This doesn’t mean we try to fail or quit early. It means we aim to meet and stretch our limits as far as we can. If we aim for that mark, we will always be doing our best, we will always be working on excellence, and we will reach our goal every time—because our goal was to fail. You can feel successful every time that you reach that natural failure point.
You don’t have to believe in yourself. You don’t have to think positively. You don’t have to wait until you’re no longer afraid or in pain to make a move—and you don’t have to shut down the pain and the fear in order to make a move, either. These common tropes aren’t part of my story, and they don’t have to be part of yours. You can absolutely not believe in yourself, be afraid, be in pain, hate it all, and still take the next step anyhow. You can hear all of those screams of “No!” and still follow the tender whisper of “Yes.”
Personally, I’m working on becoming good friends with pain and fear. For if pain and fear were no longer a problem, what problems would I have left? If one is friends with pain and fear, one is free.*
KEY FACTORS OF RESILIENCE
Being able to bounce back and keep going even when it feels like we’ve got nothing left isn’t just a matter of choice, though. Listening to that quiet inner voice that wants to set our direction in life is a great skill, a crucial one. And, the research is clear that there are conditions we can call into our lives that bolster the inner resources that foster good, continual bounce-backs.
» Community. Show me who you hang with and I’ll show you who you are.
» Identity. Where your head goes, the rest of you follows.
» Emotional literacy. Recognize what you’re feeling when you feel it. Put language around it.
» Emotional intelligence. Pause. Unblend. Get curious. Open the doorway to new choices.
» Self-talk. Speak to yourself only as you would to another person—another person who deserves a baseline of respect and mercy.
» Spirituality. Develop a rich and meaningful inner life. Connect to what matters daily.
» Make meaning of your experience. Look for the lessons. Let crisis push you to dig deeper and get stronger. Let your challenges inspire you to help others.
» Resourcefulness. Hard times are a call to get beyond-the-box creative. See the practice “Summoning Inner Resources” on this page to help get you there.
Of course, social and material privilege are among the biggest predictors of resilience as well, but they are far from the only ones.
We all hurt and we all heal. It is what we were born to do. Resilience is intrinsic to all living organisms. We can look to the experience of physical exercise as a direct corollary. We exercise with the intention of getting stronger and more flexible, but exercise doesn’t do either of those things—not directly. Working out actually injures you. It creates tiny tears in your muscles. We strengthen in the rest and recovery after the workout. Thus, the intention behind a really good workout is to injure you manageably, just enough so that you’ll emerge from your recovery stronger and more flexible than you were before. Same with life. Same with our hearts. Except we don’t need to go looking for emotional workouts. They arrive at our doorstep without us even asking. We have endless opportunities to get bruised by life and then to strengthen in our recovery from it all. And from that kind of activity comes something most precious: confidence. As we repeatedly witness ourselves getting hurt and dealing with it skillfully—and thus consistently find ourselves stronger and more emotionally agile than before—our fear of life decreases. Our defensive parts start to get the message that we are stronger and more capable than we were in childhood—which is when our core defenses were conditioned and wired into us. We become indefatigable. Ever more courageous. Outrageously courageous, even. And this is but a glimpse of what’s possible for us all.
Cultivating the factors of resilience I’ve listed above so very often boils down to the things we’re saying yes to. Who we’re in community with is up to us. How we speak to ourselves is often on autopilot—but we can choose to get off autopilot and harness the inner conversation. Cultivating an inner life, perhaps through things like meditation, contemplation, study, and therapy, may mean changing some of our habits and routines to make space for deeper things. In order to say yes to deepening our resources and quickening our capacity for bounce-back, we might need to do something that freaks many of us out more than failure does—say no.
* For the record, I mean “free” like the way Malcolm X talked about becoming free while still in prison: mentally, emotionally, spiritually free.