A person asked me recently, “What is the most difficult thing you’ve ever had to do?”
Her question took me aback. It wasn’t something I could answer spontaneously; it required a sudden, deep audit of my past. It also required a level of vulnerability I wasn’t entirely prepared for. The true answer to a question like that often involves secrets we’ve never shared with a living soul. Damn, it was a good question.
I’ve thought about it a lot over the last few weeks. It lingers. I realize now that the answer I choose will tell me a lot about who I am. Is my “most difficult thing” something physical, like staring across the line of scrimmage at “Mean Joe” Greene? Is it something intimate, like the fracture of an early heartbreak or a forbidden liaison? Could it be a major crossroads, like choosing a career or a school? Or does it involve the heavy, quiet responsibilities of a spouse, a parent, or a child? When you seriously ask yourself this question, an entire landscape of possibilities arises.
What you also discover is the trickery of memory. Some of our most dreaded moments—things we feared for weeks—turned out to be a snap. Conversely, the things we thought would be a piece of cake ended up breaking us. It taught me that difficulty isn’t always a single, explosive moment. Sometimes, it is a slow-burning year, or the quiet weight of a lifetime. Damn, it really is a good question.
Perhaps the true difficulty doesn’t lie in the events themselves, but in what they forced us to leave behind. Philosophers often argue that our hardest choices are the ones that define our identity. When we look back, the “piece of cake” that broke us was usually a moment where we had to choose who we were going to be—and bury an old version of ourselves to do it. Ultimately, the most difficult thing we ever have to do isn’t surviving a crisis or playing through the pain. It’s looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the paths we didn’t take, and owning the person we became.
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