How Much Suffering Is Enough?

For years, I believed I had to make up for being lazy.

Lately, I’ve noticed a thought, or rather, fragments of a thought, intruding during my most mundane moments—while folding laundry, chopping carrots, reversing out of the driveway. Like most thoughts with roots deep in our subconscious, it had been trying to get my attention for a while. Until finally, for whatever reason, it fully surfaced as one coherent sentence:

When will I have suffered enough?

Before I could answer, my mind immediately started rifling through my catalogue of past traumas: I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before that, I lost both my parents in quick succession when I was in my early thirties. And before even that, I survived an armed home invasion. Those are just the big things. Add to that the swirl of growing into an adult—changing careers, getting married, becoming a parent, moving cities then countries, learning how to live in a new language. I’m not unique—most people, by the time they’ve reached their forties, can point to their own collection of traumas and hardships.

Then came the deeper question: Suffered enough… for what?

Once again, the answer surfaced, like it had been waiting in the wings for its shining moment:

To atone for being lazy.

In that moment, I realized I had been carrying a belief that I was at my core a “lazy” person, and I’d spent the majority of my adult life trying to prove that I wasn’t. At the same time, I believed that if I stopped being productive and heavily challenged, I’d fall back to my default mode of laziness. So I was constantly trying to stay ahead, with the threat of laziness nipping at my feet.

I realized that much of my behavior had been driven by this belief, that if my life was hard enough and I had suffered enough, I would somehow make up for those lazy years.

I have vivid memories, beginning around the age of 12, of adults calling me “scatterbrained.” I would forget stationery at home, and would need to borrow a pen from a classmate. I wouldn’t finish my homework. I’d study for exams at the last minute. Because I still got good grades, I was able to skate through, but internally I felt overwhelmed and disjointed. My room was always a mess, but the prospect of cleaning it paralyzed me. Instead, I’d watch MTV for hours on end. I’d compare myself to friends who had perfectly organized pencil cases and drawers with neatly-folded clothes, and feel that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

This pattern followed me into early adulthood. My first apartments were messy. I’d stare at the sink of dirty dishes, but cleaning them felt like a gargantuan task. I recoiled at the thought of a traditional 9-5 job, and instead pursued journalism, believing that would give me more freedom and variety. But I used that again as evidence that I was different to other people, that only a “lazy” person would resist knuckling down and going to an office every day.

After I had my second child, soon after my father died, I decided to go on an SSRI for anxiety. It was gradual, but I started noticing that cleaning the kitchen didn’t feel as hard as it had before. I no longer sat in front of a blank page, paralyzed for hours, unable to write the first sentence of an article. I folded laundry and actually put it away.

Early days of motherhood

Okay, I thought to myself, this is good. If I just keep going in this way, I’ll prove that I’m no longer lazy. I developed an obsession with organization and keeping the house tidy. I kept adding things to my plate—work, travel, friends, family, exercise, cleaning—busy, busy, busy. If I felt tired, I’d ignore it. Because if I sat down with a book in the middle of the day, that would signal a relapse. I’d be back to being lazy!

My life needed to feel hard to prove I was no longer that person.

Now I’m starting to wonder if all this time, I had simply misunderstood myself. Maybe what I called laziness was something else entirely. Anxiety, executive dysfunction, or possibly ADHD. I don’t know.

Whatever it was, I had spent decades trying to convince some invisible jury that I wasn’t lazy. Was the jury my parents? My sisters? My friends?

So I asked my older sister the other day, “Did everyone in the family view me as lazy?”

She reacted with surprise. “But I’ve never thought you were lazy!” She said she doubted our parents saw me that way either.

The jury never existed. I had been performing for an invisible audience, but it was just me all along. No amount of suffering would ever feel like enough, because there was no debt to begin with.

It’s a strange feeling when you realize that an assumption you’ve carried about yourself for decades might be wrong. This belief had been resting heavily on my shoulders, and now I’m experimenting with shrugging it off.

I never liked the word “lazy” anyway.

Thank you, as always for reading. I’m so grateful. xo