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With Lifelong Struggles, Effort Isn’t What’s Missing

Wednesday, January 23, 2019 14:17

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“With Lifelong Struggles, Effort Isn’t What’s Missing”

by David Cain

“A friend told me a touching story about his high-school classmate—a story that I now believe happens, in some form, to almost everybody. It happened to me, and probably to you.

The classmate was known as a gifted athlete and a bad student, and acknowledged it himself. He played wide receiver on the football team, but he had a maddening habit of lining up on the wrong side, and cutting right when he was supposed to cut left. The coach kept him on the team because he was fast and played hard, and his route-running mistakes could be corrected. But the mistakes continued, and the coach quickly surmised that something else was going on. He eventually had the student visit a psychologist, and it turned out he was inverting the pass patterns because he was dyslexic.

This explained his trouble in the classroom too. He wasn’t a bad student, he just had no idea he was experiencing schoolwork so differently than everyone else. Once he was assessed, he (and his teachers) could finally make sure he had the extra time he needed to do his assignments.

You can find countless similar stories of kids who were told for years that they weren’t paying attention or weren’t applying themselves, when they actually just needed glasses and couldn’t read the blackboard. What a world-shifting discovery that must be for each of those kids, as well as for their parents and teachers.

I now wonder if most of us are, in some respect, the kid who needs glasses but doesn’t know it. It’s a phenomenon common to so many life stories: struggling desperately with something because you’re unaware that you’re experiencing it differently than everyone around you.

When we struggle with something that most people don’t seem to struggle with, we start to believe the inevitable messaging that pops up in response: we’re dumb, lazy, or just not cut out for the activity in question. We need to focus, or put in more effort. We try. A lifestyle develops around the story—one that leaves a wide berth around the problem, so as not to constantly trigger the pain around it. Someone who struggled in school, for any of a thousand reasons, might forever avoid intellectual challenges in every form, from attending college to attending barroom trivia nights.

That’s why these unrecognized differences in our inner experience tend to stay unrecognized—because we tend to live in ways that avoid making our struggles obvious. We avoid the situations in which we feel like we don’t fit, which prevents us from ever learning what exactly is happening. The root of this oversight is that nobody can assess ease and difficulty objectively. Each of us gets to know the world and its challenges through a unique, private inner experience, which nobody else can see, so nobody has a direct view of what’s easy or hard in the experience of others. We piece together what’s “normal”—as in the benchmark we tend to compare ourselves to—by observing how others, on the whole, seem to be doing at the same challenges.

But here’s the kicker: they’re not necessarily the same challenges. Trying to understand a blackboard lesson with blurry vision is a much greater demand on one’s faculties than doing it with 20/20 vision. Dating when you have an anxiety condition is an order of magnitude more difficult than doing it without one, even with all other factors equal.

When we aren’t aware of a drastic difference between how we and others experience a given situation, all parties tend to attribute the difference in outcome to either innate talent, or vague, morally-salient qualities like perseverance, self-discipline, or getting one’s “priorities straight.” There’s even a billion dollar self-help industry largely focused on shoring up those qualities, as though deficits in them can explain all of our shortcomings.

I believe this oversight has a huge impact on how each of us sees ourselves and our possibilities, and not just in cases of diagnosable conditions like ADD, anxiety, or dyslexia. Something can be ten times harder simply because we don’t have a vital bit of information that others have.

When I first started playing guitar, there was a brief, frustrating time when I just could not understand how people made most chords sound good. I could make G major sound good, and C sounded okay. But everything else sounded muddy, and even other beginners were so much better. I knew I had the fingering right. The problem was an extremely simple (but crucial) oversight: you have to push the strings down to the fretboard, not just put your fingers on them in the right places. A paradigm-shifting moment, albeit a small one. Suddenly everything was possible again.

However big or small the issue, we stop looking for real explanations once we begin to summarize our struggles as “I suck” (or when others likewise summarize them for us.) Unfortunately that’s often the first and most persistent message we get.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s always some hidden misunderstanding, or undiagnosed condition, corresponding to every single thing we struggle with. Sometimes the difference is a haphazard matter of luck, confidence, experience or some combination. But when the struggle persists over years and decades, I would bet there’s a major, difference-making factor present that accounts for most of the difficulty—and once we see it, the world changes. These through-the-looking-glass moments can completely alter your sense of identity, of how worthy and likeable you feel. And they can happen any time.

I’m 38, and just this year I began to understand the magnitude of my social anxiety issues, particularly how differently I’ve been experiencing things like concerts, parties, phone calls, gift exchanges, interactions with bus drivers and a thousand other ordinary situations. My whole life, these and other everyday normal-person things have seemed like tremendous challenges to navigate.

To make a life-long story extremely short, I now understand the extraordinary difference-making factor behind so much of what has hard for me: I was operating, at all times, with a particular obsessive thinking habit concerning how other people were perceiving me. Now that I see it, I can account for it, and life is changing rapidly. Goals and interests that seemed off-limits now feel as available to me as they always seemed for everyone else, for the first time in my adult life.

Living almost to middle age without understanding this inner difference created all kinds of secondary complications for me: severe procrastination; cynicism about success; a sense of alienation towards crowds, events, and people having fun; questionable drinking habits; writer’s block; an inability to ask for help, and many more balls and chains. Now I’m experiencing the fascinating and disorienting process of reassessing my relationship to virtually everything I do (or have avoided doing). It’s a new world, one that makes much more sense.

I guess I’m sharing this to get two bottom-line points across. Firstly, that two people’s experiences of the same challenge can differ wildly, and that there’s so much more at play than desire, effort, and perseverance. Yet most of the messages we get about success, in school, at work, and in popular culture, minimize everything else. When we account for the unseen complicating factors going on inside each of us, nobody can ever tell you how hard or easy something should be for you. They don’t have enough information.

Secondly, that when we do start to discover how we differ from most of the people around us, walls can come down. When it comes to our lifelong struggles, what’s missing almost certainly isn’t effort, or determination, or chutzpah or any of that crap. More likely, it’s understanding—both from others and from ourselves.”

- https://raptitude.com

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/01/with-lifelong-struggles-effort-isnt.html

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