what does hard even mean

on borrowed difficulty, the luxury of struggle, and why the word deserves more respect than we give it

i cancelled plans last week because i said i was having a hard week.

and i was. sort of. the thesis was dragging, i was tired, i didn’t feel like being social. it was uncomfortable and i didn’t want to do it. so i said it was hard and i stayed home.

and then i thought about the word i’d just used. and i felt something like embarrassment.

because hard is a word that has carried real weight across human history. and i’d just used it to describe not wanting to leave my apartment.

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the word we reach for

we use hard constantly. for traffic. for conversations we don’t want to have. for degrees that require focus. for jobs that are demanding. for relationships that take work. for tuesdays that just feel heavy for no reason.

hard has become our all-purpose word for anything that asks more of us than we’d prefer to give. if it creates friction, it’s hard. if it takes effort, it’s hard. if it makes us uncomfortable, if it makes us tired, if it requires us to do something we didn’t feel like doing — hard.

i’ve been sitting with how much this word does for us. and how much, maybe, we’ve let it off the hook.

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what hard actually looked like

harriet tubman made thirteen trips back into slave territory after she had already escaped.

not one. thirteen. each trip risked her life, her freedom, everything she’d fought to build. she carried a gun and reportedly told the people she was guiding: if you’re too scared to keep going, i’ll shoot you myself — because a scared person going back could get everyone killed. she didn’t have the option of cancelling her plans. she didn’t have the luxury of staying home because the week felt heavy.

that is hard.

or take Wangari Maathai — kenyan environmentalist, first african woman to win the nobel peace prize. she started planting trees in kenya in 1977, work the government found so threatening that she was beaten, imprisoned, and publicly ridiculed by the president who called her a madwoman. she planted trees anyway. for decades. through the beatings. through the mockery. through the political persecution.

not because it felt good. because it was the thing she believed in.

or take the ordinary people throughout history whose names we never learned — the medieval peasant who woke up before sunrise to farm land they didn’t own, who watched their children die from preventable diseases, who lived their entire lives inside a radius of a few miles and still showed up the next day. no instagram break. no terminology for burnout. no option to take a mental health day.

hard, for most of human history, meant: you might die. or your children might die. or the thing you love might be taken from you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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i’m not saying suffering is a competition

i want to be careful here.

i’m not saying that your pain doesn’t count because someone else had it worse. i’m not saying that hard should only be reserved for extreme circumstances. i’m not making a hierarchy of struggle.

what i’m saying is: we’ve lost the distinction between hard and uncomfortable. between genuinely difficult and merely effortful. between something that costs you something real and something that just asks you to push through friction.

psychologists call it cognitive distortion when we catastrophise — when we take something difficult and amplify it into something unbearable. and i think there’s a version of this at a cultural level. we have collectively learned to call things hard in a way that actually prevents us from doing them. because if it’s hard, you’re allowed to stop. if it’s hard, no one can judge you for struggling. if it’s hard, you have permission.

the word has become an exit.

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what i think is actually happening

here’s what i’ve started to notice: most of the things i call hard aren’t hard. they’re uncomfortable.

uncomfortable is: doing the thing when i’m tired. having the conversation i’ve been avoiding. finishing the chapter i don’t care about. staying in a city that doesn’t feel like mine yet, for the fourth month in a row, while it rains.

hard is: doing the thing when it costs you something real. when the stakes are your safety, your livelihood, your people, your dignity. when there is no out.

the problem is that we treat uncomfortable the way we treat hard — which means we give ourselves permission to stop when we shouldn’t. we treat the friction as evidence that something is wrong, as proof that we shouldn’t be here, as a sign to quit. when actually the friction is just — friction. the normal, unavoidable texture of doing something that matters.

uncomfortable is not a reason to stop. it’s a reason to notice that you’re actually doing something.

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the thing about doing hard things

harriet tubman didn’t describe what she was doing as hard. she described it as necessary.

i think about that word a lot. necessary. not easy, not comfortable, not even desirable — just necessary. the thing that had to be done, and so it was done. the option to call it hard and stop was not an option that existed.

and i wonder what would shift if we held ourselves to that word instead. not: is this hard? but: is this necessary? not: do i feel like doing this? but: is this the thing that has to be done?

because most of the things we call hard — we actually know are necessary. the thesis. the difficult conversation. the city that doesn’t feel like home yet. the life we’re building while we’re not sure we’re doing it right. we know these things have to be done. we just want permission to feel like it’s okay that they’re difficult.

and they are. it’s okay that they’re difficult. but difficult doesn’t mean you stop. it means you’ve arrived at the part that counts.

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what i want to say

i’m not immune to this. i still use the word hard when i mean uncomfortable. i still let the friction feel bigger than it is. i still, sometimes, stay home.

but i’m trying to notice the difference now. between the thing that is genuinely, deeply, historically difficult — and the thing that just requires me to push through something i’d prefer to avoid.

uncomfortable means: keep going.

hard means: you’re being asked to do something that matters.

either way, the answer is the same.