I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to struggle.
This year has been filled with it, everywhere I turn.
Work has felt like a grind. The business isn’t growing like I hoped.
I’ve had to rethink what direction I’m even heading in more times than I can count.
Old insecurities I thought I’d outgrown started whispering again.
And then there’s my personal life.
A few unexpected things crept in. Quiet, but still there.
The kind of weight that lingers, even when everything looks fine from the outside.
And in the middle of all that, I picked up swimming.
It seemed simple enough.
Until it wasn’t.
I nearly drowned once.
And even though I’ve long believed I got over that, some part of it stayed in my body.
Every time I stepped into the pool, something old stirred.
My chest would tighten. My mind would spiral.
I’d flail, even when no one else could see it.
Still, I kept going.
Lesson after lesson.
Class after class.
Dreading it most of the time.
It took me over ten swimming classes just to swim five meters
without my feet always reaching for the floor.
And there was a big problem…
I had signed up for an open water diving certification in the Philippines with a friend.
I had committed to something much bigger than me,
and I couldn’t even trust my body to float.
I’ve done other sports before. I’ve pushed myself.
But this? Swimming felt like my Achilles heel.
And somewhere between gasping for air and failing my laps,
I started to understand something.
This discomfort, this resistance, this fear, it wasn’t a sign that something was going wrong.
It was the work.
Not the obstacle. The path itself.
For a long time, I believed in seasons.
That life moves between ease and hardship like the weather and it keeps repeating itself.
And maybe that’s still true.
But lately I’ve started to wonder if we’re meant to carry a little struggle with us always.
Not as punishment, but as practice.
I get the appeal of ease. Of lightness.
Of the hedonistic lifestyle.
But the truth is, growth rarely comes from comfort.
I’ve come to see struggle as sacred.
Like Nietzsche said, maybe the meaning we’re all chasing doesn’t live in the absence of pain and struggle, but in the way we meet it.
Maybe this ache in my lungs, this fear in the water,
Maybe that’s my own path to becoming.
Maybe I needed this to shift something rooted in me.
To move a little closer to the version of myself I’ve been trying to grow into.
Lately, I’ve been thinking: Maybe the goal isn’t to stop struggling.
Maybe the goal is to learn how to do it well.
To learn how to struggle with presence,
through every season not just the easy ones.
To stop seeing it as something to escape,
and instead, something to embrace.
A kind of muscle. A kind of rhythm. A kind of practice.
And the hope is that I keep getting better at it!
PS: I started writing this before I took my open water diving certification. Happy to say I made it through!
Though to be honest, a lot went wrong. I almost quit after the first day.
But I stayed.
I finished the course.
I did the dives.
Maybe I am getting better at this struggling thing…
Now my job is to remember:
Struggle is not the enemy.
It’s the practice.
And maybe, just maybe, learning how to stay with it is what living well actually looks like.