Most of us have, somewhere behind us, a year we didn’t think we’d get through. Not necessarily in a dramatic way. Just in the quiet, grinding sense of not knowing how to do another day of it. And then somehow, day after day, we did.
The thing about being in the middle of a hard year is that you can’t see the other side. You’re not in a position to know that it ends. You’re managing an hour at a time, or sometimes less than that. And that becomes your baseline: this is just what life is now, and I have to keep going, and I don’t know how.
What’s strange is that most people, when they look back at those years from a safer distance, are at least a little surprised they made it. Not because the hard thing went away. Usually it didn’t, or it did only eventually. But because they discover they were more capable of carrying it than they’d ever thought to check. The year didn’t necessarily get easier. They got more accustomed to what it asked of them.
What it feels like to be in it
When our first daughter was born, I thought I knew what was coming. The general shape of it, at least. I did not. The newborn stage was something else entirely, a complete restructuring of every system I’d built for myself, arriving at the exact moment I had no reserves left to adjust. Everything that used to be reliable stopped being reliable. The days were both endless and impossibly full. Some of those early weeks I look back on now and barely recognize the version of myself that got through them.
The details are different for everyone. For some it’s a medical diagnosis. For some it’s the end of something they built. For some it’s the fog of early parenthood, grief, a relationship collapsing, a job gone, a loss that doesn’t have a name yet. The specific contents of the year don’t change the shape of what it feels like to be in the worst of it.
I say this not to dramatize what is, in many ways, a universal human experience. I say it because something specific happens to most people in the deepest part of a hard season: you stop being able to imagine a before or an after. You exist entirely in the middle. And the middle is where the doubt lives. It sounds like: I cannot keep doing this. And yet you do.
What the research shows about getting through hard things
George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University who has spent decades studying how people respond to trauma and major life stress, has documented something that surprised many professionals in his field: resilience is not the rare outcome. It is the most common one. Most people, when exposed to significant disruption, manage to maintain functioning and eventually return to a version of themselves that still works.
What this doesn’t mean is that getting through hard things looks like success. As Bonanno put it: “When we’re coping with really difficult things, we just want to get through it. It doesn’t need to be pretty, it doesn’t need to make us super healthy people. We just need to get through it.”
The bar, in the hardest seasons, is just that. Getting through it. Not elegantly. Not without breaking down. Not without missing things you wanted to do, or spending stretches of time in a state that didn’t look remotely like the person you thought you were. Getting through means something much simpler and harder than that. It means you kept going until the thing shifted.
I’m not a psychologist, and I want to be careful not to flatten what is, for some people, a genuinely serious struggle that needs real support. But what Bonanno’s research suggests is that the human capacity for getting through hard things is both widespread and consistently underestimated, including by the people who are currently in the middle of them.
What looking back actually shows you
The surprise people feel when they look back on a hard year is worth paying attention to. It’s not the surprise of discovering that things were actually fine, or that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Usually it was as bad as it seemed. The surprise is something else.
It’s the discovery that you were capable of more endurance than you knew. That the person who made it through that year was you. Not a stronger version of you, not a different version. The same one who, at some point in the middle of it, genuinely didn’t know how to keep going.
What looking back gives you is evidence. Evidence that you have a track record. That hard things have already happened to you and you are still here, on the other side of them. That track record is sometimes the most useful thing you own, not because it guarantees anything about what’s ahead, but because it answers the question a hard year tends to ask: whether you’re the kind of person who gets through hard things. The answer, if you look back honestly, is usually yes. The evidence is the fact that you’re still here.
If you’re reading this from inside a hard year right now, this article isn’t trying to tell you that you’ll definitely be fine, or that it all works out. I don’t know that. But I do know that the version of you who finds it nearly impossible to see how you’ll get through is the same version that, for most people, eventually does. And if things are genuinely heavy right now, please consider talking to a therapist. The point of surviving hard things isn’t to survive them alone.
The surprise, when it comes, is yours. Most people do get there.
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