I think for me it’d be, in no particular order:
[ul]
[li]Watching my father die.[/li][li]Watching my brother cry about it.[/li][li]Signing away rights to what would be my only child.[/li][li]Not killing myself every day.[/li][/ul] olivesmarch4th makes some excellent points about depression and suicide. I know that the hardest thing I do now, even in what is kind of a hard life all around ATM, is forcing myself to get through each day without killing myself.
BTW, some of the posts in this thread have pierced through my medication-induced numbness and made me tear up.
Isn’t that what they always say about suicide - it’s a permanent solution to temporary problems? (In case I haven’t said it before, I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself. ETA: You too, Sudden Kestrel. )
Surviving overnight, following a mis-diagnosed ruptured appendix.
Hiking through Horseshoe Canyon in Utah. I was in my 60s and out of shape. It was 123 degrees in the canyon that day, with very little shade. I was not an experienced hiker, and suffered from a debilitating migraine, lower back spasms, painful leg cramps, a twisted ankle, etc., etc. And I had stupidly neglected to tell anyone where I was going, or when to expect me back. Oh, and I couldn’t get help from anyone, because I was the only person in the canyon that day, plus I couldn’t get a cell phone signal. And at the end of the ordeal, when I was also suffering from total exhaustion and hallucinations, I had to climb up 800 vertical feet to my car.
It was only afterwards that I learned that this was the same canyon where Aron Ralston had to cut off his own arm (127 Hours).
Telling my son (then 10 yrs old) that his father had died.
That was on a Tuesday.
When he woke up the next morning he asked me what day it was and I said Wednesday.
He said he was hoping it was Tuesday and that yesterday hadn’t happened.
That hurt.
Emotional / willpower: Confronting my father’s alcoholism for the first time. I was fifteen years old. I went out to his car, retrieved a small bottle of Kahlua that I had found earlier, shoved it in his face and said “We need to talk.” We cried all night. Since that moment I have never had trouble pushing myself through fear to do what was necessary – which is not to say that I have conquered fear entirely, but that event certainly helped.
Physical / skill: About 6 months ago, I was asked to design a set for an old friend who was (and still is) trying to start a children’s theater company. The main component of the set was a platform with a life-sized artificial tree on it. The platform had to be able to rotate and support an actor’s weight, and the tree needed to be able to support enough weight to hold up a sign or two. I decided to build a wooden frame, wrap it with chicken wire, and then wrap that with muslin cloth. I called up a high school friend and brought her on board as the master painter.
Here’s what made it hard:
While I had been doing theater for a long time, I had never designed an entire set, nor had I ever been given a budget to work with.
The designs had to work around an existing set that was living in the space we would be using.
I had no experience with any CAD programs, so I ended up doing my designs on paper and MS Paint.
The budget for both the building materials and the paints was only $1000 (not nearly enough).
I had three work days to build the entire show with only one other carpenter to help me.
I had never worked with chicken wire before.
The construction took place in a shop that I had never worked in before.
One of the work days stretched from 10 am to 1 am. I was both physically exhausted and overwhelmed by sheer amount of shit that had to be done. The worst part was that during a rehearsal, for some dumb reason it was decided that they weren’t going to rotate the tree at all, despite the fact that the majority of the budget and work time was spent making that a possibility. Sad pandas.
Most difficult things I’ve done? In no particular order:
[ul][li]Going to counseling group, where I knew I would face intensity of emotion which my gut told me would kill me. It didn’t, but it felt like it did. Of the events in counseling group, the most difficult was to face a woman and participate in a screaming-level argument. It took the support of two of the other men to get me through it, but that was the first time in my life I ever survived an argument like that. (I say survived, not ‘won’–it was not really a matter of trying to convince the other person of a logically-held point of view; it felt more like walking voluntarily into whirling blades.) [/li][li]Going to school every day from kindergarten to the end of grade 9, when I knew the bullies were there. [/li][li]Surviving the deaths of my mom, my sister, my stepmother, and my aunt, all during the nineties.[/li][li]Seeing my dad decline before his death. I was the last member of my family to see him alive, and I saw him shortly after his death.[/li][li]Dealing with the fact that, thanks to various choices I have made, I will never have many of the relationships others have. Sometimes I look wistfully at my friends who are happily married and have beautiful children. But I’m 48 and it’s too late for that for me… not to mention that I don’t think I could deal with the 24-hour-ness of parenting. But it doesn’t mean I’m not wistful at times. [/li][li]Dealing with the fact that, thanks to various choices I have made, I will never have many of the things others have. The layoff didn’t help, but neither did events afterwards. [/li][/ul]
This is true. I never thought of it before, but it makes a lot of sense.
Been there.
I am there now, in fact (the unemployed part). It it wasn’t for the help and support and inspiration I am getting from my friends and from various social workers and people I have met, I would probably have become homeless sometime in the past year and killed myself.
One major reason I haven’t killed myself is that it would inconvenience my friends. And one thing I use to keep going is to fixate on some interesting upcoming event and hope I can just survive until it happens–things like the release of the new plastic banknotes, for example, or the upcoming visit of family friends from New Zealand.
I hope I will find a resolution that good. Or at least a successful interview. I’m planning to go back to school, if I don’t find work.
My husband and I brought home a newborn baby from an adoption agency, believing he was ours forever, and had to surrender him about 60 days later. Putting him back in his birthmother’s arms was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, followed close behind by getting out of bed every day for about the next year.
The hardest thing I’ve ever done is learning to swim at age 33 after being terrified of water ever since I was a small child. My mother lost her brother to drowning and instilled a deep phobia in us. It took me three lessons standing in 3 feet of water for the instructuor to get me just to put my face into the water.
It is hugely, hugely important to have something to always look forward to, even if it’s a little thing. Also, I’m unemployed again… but this time, I’m not afraid. Don’t worry, we’ll make it through. (hugs)
Thanks. (Now you know why that thread about polymer banknotes got to five pages.) I hope something comes up for both of us.
And it’s not to say that other things haven’t been happening. A big part of the free job-search help from the regional government has has focused on the social aspects of job searching. For someone who thought that technical skills were the main thing that mattered, this has been a major learning and adaptation.
There’s other stuff happening, too. I’m working on a storyboard for an animation contest, and I actually published a small comic a few months ago. And I’m working on learning French (finally). I’m learning how to make my own ebooks. I’m planning my own comic book.
But none of the other stuff helps with the job search. I may end up in Alberta if I find a job offer there. Or here in Ontario. But jobs for technical writers with only electronics experience are few and far between. If my other expertise was financial or programming, or if I was fluent in French, I would have been much more in demand. If a job doesn’t happen, it’s back to school with support from Second Career, the Ontario retraining program. If Second Career turns me down, I guess I’ll be stocking shelves at Walmart…
Going to the hospital after being raped. I was badly injured but so humiliated and I didn’t want anyone to know. Second would be talking to the police.
Having to wake up my 9 year old daughter after I found my husband not breathing at 1:30 am because I needed someone to hold the three month old who was bawling from hunger while I got on the phone with 911.
Also, talking at his memorial service was probably one of the hardest things I have ever done.I walked up to the mic, there was pin drop silence, faces of people who knew and loved Jesse stared back at me with tears in their eyes and sadness.
Before Jesse’s death, I used to think that the 37 hours of labor (around 25 of the 37 hours was without drugs) was going to be the hardest thing I had every done.
I didn’t add being a single parent. It* is* the hardest thing (especially when your kid goes to a school where everyone has a dad and a house and a passport) I’ve ever done…but I get so much pleasure from it.
There have been a couple of sensitive conversations with my son about his biological father. It’s very had to explain to a child that someone didn’t want to be a parent, especially when you refuse to badmouth.
Euthanizing a much loved cat that had been with me for 18+ years. He was traumatized by riding in the car to the vet when he was at his peak so I sure wasn’t going to subject him to that as he was dying.
So I did it myself. As he slept on his blankie on the couch. With a .22 pistol.
I sat with the gun watching him sleep overnight, not able to do it.
The second night I knew it was time. I like to think he never felt a thing.
)