When Our Hard Isn’t Hard Enough
A close friend of mine specializes in counseling cancer patients. I’ve always been in awe of her work; sitting with that level of loss and grief requires immense emotional stamina. Yet, she shared an observation from her practice that completely floored me.
In one of the support groups she runs, whenever a member goes into remission, an unexpected pattern emerges: they often discuss leaving the group.
You might assume they leave because they are physically healed and ready to move on. But the reality is much more poignant. They want to leave because they feel their suffering no longer "qualifies." They look around at group members who are still terminally ill and decide that their own draining, terrifying, and painful journey isn't "hard enough" anymore.
As I processed this, it struck a deep chord. How often do we do this to ourselves in everyday life?
We navigate a painful relationship ending, lose a job, or struggle with the profound grief of losing a parent. But instead of offering ourselves grace, we immediately look outward. We point to people facing systemic trauma, poverty, or terminal illness and tell ourselves, “Others have it worse. I have no right to feel this way.”
While it’s true that human suffering exists on a massive scale, minimizing your own pain creates a dangerous internal rule: I am only worthy of kindness if my trauma is the absolute worst.
When we give more weight to other people's losses, we don't actually alleviate their pain—we just diminish our own capacity to heal. We set up an impossible, punitive standard for self-compassion. If we only permit ourselves to grieve when we have hit rock bottom compared to the rest of the world, we cultivate a default state of self-contempt during life's inevitably difficult moments.
Loss and hardship are two of the only true guarantees we have. Pain is not a competitive sport, and your nervous system doesn't care about global statistics; it only knows that it hurts.
In moments of deep grief, healing doesn't come from ranking our trauma. It comes from stepping into our common humanity. Instead of comparing who has it harder, we need to create space for our unique, individual hardships. Compassion is not a finite resource. Giving it to yourself doesn't take it away from someone else. Your "hard" is allowed to be hard enough.
