How to Make Sense of a Very Hard Year

Some years ask something genuinely difficult of all of us, to build and maintain a life worth living inside conditions that feel measurably harder than what came before. The result, clinically, is what might be called coherent despair: a sense of difficulty that is entirely proportionate to circumstances, and therefore feels impossible to argue yourself out of, because it isn't irrational. You're not catastrophising. You're paying attention. And yet, keeping your nervous system permanently braced for the next difficulty, also extracts a cost. This is the particular bind of living through genuinely hard times: the difficulty is real, and so is the harm of treating it as the only reality.

Working with it, rather than through it, past it, or around it, is the key distinction. Most coping advice treats difficulty as a temporary weather system to be endured until conditions improve. What a psychologist would tell you is that the more practical question is: how do you want to be in this world as it currently is? That involves some combination of honest acknowledgement of what's genuinely hard, active investment in the things that are inside your control: relationships, health, work you find meaningful, rest, and where needed, professional support to understand why some of this is landing harder on you than on others around you. The answer to that last question is almost always worth knowing.