What's the Most Difficult Thing You've Done?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

GardeningSpirit, I am so sorry to read of your loss. Daniel is still alive in you; in the people he encountered and altered; in the way he changed you, and made you feel; never forget that. He will remain a ripple on the pond of the universe.

Transistor Rhythm I hear ya, bro. When you’re like you - or me - it’s a tough thing to hold down, and I don’t always do a good job of it. If I could work how I want to work, I would do a great job, and it would be an amazing thing. But I can’t, and nor can you, and I understand.

For me, the toughest thing was a time that I have termed my Angel of Death: my best friend’s incredibly well loved father died suddenly, and my buddy was too messed up to tell people, so I took the responsiblity to go through through his dad’s phone book and call all his friends and acquaintances and tell them, then walk around town with my friend a few paces behind me, giving them the bad news.

That, and finding body parts after the tsunami.

22

I feel like such a wuss, reading these posts. A big fat pampered wuss. But my hard things are difficult for me!

I think for me the hardest is yet to come. Parent living alone, aging, and getting more feeble… husband headed for a heart attack… some damage, alarmingly expensive, is happening to the house…

The hardest thing as mentioned: parenting. There is no higher high, and there is no lower low.

Gardening Spirit and all who have lost loved ones: ((((((((I share your pain)))))))).

23

I get it. I’ve worked for 42 years and had 44 jobs. That’s gotta be some kinda record.

24

For me it would be voluntarily becoming the stepfather of a then-twelve-year-old boy, and the two and a half years since. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that being a stepparent is actually more difficult than being a parent, especially at this age, because you get all of the crap that comes with parenting without having that parental bond of love that should have been forged earlier on in life. At least, I know that my wife’s love for her son certainly outweighs mine, and it helps her get through the difficult moments.

25

I was going to say parenting: but step-parenting must trump all.

26

For me, the death of one of my children would trump everything.

{{ GusNSpot }}
{{ Gardening Spirit }}

27

My toughest thing is a jumble of the past year and a bit: graduate school, taking care of my mother while she was dying (and being brave for her), planning a wedding, trying a few new skills (martial arts was the toughest), and adding in enough extra work to my studies that I now have a pretty good resume for a new graduate. All of this at 25-6 years old; at times, I feel world weary, and at others, accomplished.

28

Pushing an 11 pound baby through my pelvis.
No drugs, no stitches afterward.

29

Up until recently, I probably would have said conquering my fear of flying was the hardest thing I’ve done.

Currently, I’d say that trying to offer forgiveness and ask for forgiveness and repair a marriage that has been badly broken is the hardest thing I’ve done.

Still, I recognize that I have not had a very difficult life by the standards of many people, and I consider myself fortunate.

30

Getting the instrument rating on the pilot licence is one of the more difficult things I’ve done. Some of the things I have done at work that involve debugging and reverse engineering some very low-level system software are also quite difficult.

Those are nothing, of course, compared to some of the stuff you guys have gone through. I’m such a wimp. :o

31

It’s trite compared to some of the real tragedy posted, but here goes.

I joined the HS basketball team as a freshman. Now, we had a decent team with a strong (read: brutal) program that washed out scrubs.

I was never that great at basketball. First and foremost: my ball handling was shit. This wasn’t a surprise to me, even at age 15-16. It was the same on the soccer team (which I washed out of a year earlier, though not through lack of effort. Just skill.)

I could run fast, I could play tough (read=willing to take and give a good beating. In both sports I was excellent on defense, but pretty mediocre on offense. So it goes). I just wasn’t that great at finesse with a ball.

Anyways, as a freshman I joined the basketball team. I took like four beatings daily from the more skilled players, at least in scrimmages. Maybe halfway through the season, I made a pact with myself:

“I can’t outskilll these players. They’re better than me. But fuck them, I’ll beat them in the conditioning exercises if it kills me.”

I still don’t know how I did it. But I did it. We had to run “suicides” - this being, you line up on the baseline, run to quarter quart, slap the line, run to half-court, slap the line, run to three-quarters courty, slap the line, run full court, slap the line, run back.

It got to where the good players would try to benchmark themselves by me. “Oh, I was with GameHat up until the last suicide!”

At the end of the season I got a mention from the coach. “I don’t think I ever saw GameHat come in second for a ‘suicide’”

That same day he told me I wouldn’t get picked for the HS summer league. It hurt like hell. I knew I had tried harder than 90% of these guys. I knew I didn’t have the natural talent, but damn it, I had put more in. At the same time, I was able to say - Fuck them. Let them play HS sports for a year or two. The discipline I’ve learned will help me go further than all of them.

It worked out. I don’t think I know any HS athletes from my school that have gone on to anything good.

It still hurts though. God Damn it, I wish I had been picked for that HS team. But I did learn a lot - about discipline, about effort.

I’m glad I suffered so hard from HS sports, though I wish I had gotten more from them. So it goes.

32

I had to give my two-month old adopted son back to his mother-at-birth. (Story too long and painful to tell. She wanted me to raise him, though. Bad all around.) I had waited years for a child and had been doing adoptive breastfeeding. Actually handing him back into her arms was the single hardest and worst thing I’ve ever had to do. I hope I never top it.

33

Weird, when I first read the title to this thread I thought "oh cool, I’ve got one, the time I locked myself out of the house and climbed in the back window by leaping off a ladder that was propped far from the window. (You would need to see a diagram for that to make sense.) Then I started reading the posts, I read all the posts and I thought shit, these people are serious. So OK none of you know me and this will be real cathartic.

The most difficult thing I have ever done was talk my mother down from her drug-induced highs. This was a daily occurrence beginning at first grade and ending when I was about 11 years olds. Every day I would come home and did not know who would be there. Would it be “normal” happy mommy? Would it be the raging angry mommy? Would it be the hallucinating mommy who would be in an involved in an in-depth conversation with “people” who were invisible to me? Would mommy be trying to push her eyes in with some kitchen utensil?

So “parenting” my parent when I was a child would be my most difficult thing.

34

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is not something I’m prepared to talk about here. Only a handful of people on Earth know anything about it, and it’s far too painful and triggering to tell right now.

Other difficult things I’ve done:

Being tear-gassed and escaping a riot in Turkey.

Parenting my parent (ditto).

Surviving depression, joblessness, low self-esteem, and being broke, all at the same time.

The collapse of a long-term friendship with someone I thought would have my back forever.

Discovering the man I thought was my father was not biologically my father.

Taking an AIDS test (clean, thank Og)

Taking a diabetes test (also clean)

Best case scenario: a misshapen thyroid. Worst case scenario: cancer. As it turned out, I have an endocrine disorder, but fortunately no cancer.

Realizing I may never graduate from college.

35

Getting clean and sober.

36

Two chicks at the same time, man.

37

I can’t think of any one that was the most difficult, but I have a few that were very difficult, and often interlinked. In no particular order:

  • Dealing with my mother’s death. I wasn’t the primary caregiver, but I’d make the 120 mile trip on the weekends to relieve my sister.

  • Calling family and friends for first notification of the above.

  • Losing a job I had for 15 years, living through a 7 month unemployment period, then moving 700 miles away for a new start. In the process, I left my son behind with my in-laws because he wanted to finish high school where he was.

  • Dealing with the near bankruptcy about a year after the move to Virginia.

  • Flunking out of college, through every fault of my own. Unrelated to any/all above.

38

Calling my brother-in-law from the hospital’s emergency room and telling him that his little girl, 2 years old, had been severely injured in a car accident. My mom was driving; she was t-boned at 60 mph by a guy who fell asleep and ran through his stop sign.

My niece died later that evening from her injuries.

39

Many of you seem to have a different definition of “difficult” than I do.

If something happens to me, or if I’m in a situation where I simply have no choice, that’s not difficult. It may be painful or nasty, but not difficult.

Holding my dog’s head in my lap while the vet euthanizes him? That was difficult. I had a choice. I didn’t have to be there, but I did it because I thought the dog deserved to have me hold him while he died. It was hard to force myself to do that.

Dealing with my father’s death? Painful, but pretty easy. I felt like a robot going through my daily routine for quite a while afterwards, but there weren’t any hard choices–nothing I had to force myself to do.

Competing in a rodeo in between chemo treatments? That was difficult. My teammates would have understood if I bailed. But it was something I needed to do. I had to force myself, but at age 45 it would be my last chance to do it (and at the time I probably had a 50/50 chance of surviving the treatments anyway).

Various ways I’ve injured myself? Again, painful, but quite easy.

I think “difficult” involves forcing yourself to do something.

40

For me – giving approval to have the ventilator removed from my 7-month-old daughter, Kelly, who died shortly thereafter. (The was post-open heart surgery.) Dealing with her death was beyond difficult; it was surreal. The grief is crushing and inescapable. Thank God time helps you deal with it.