“Ugh life.”

This has been a common phrase between friends and classmates lately, and to us it expresses a lot without really articulating much – it is the perfect response to so many situations and struggles. For many people I know, things have been particularly challenging lately, and it’s been a bit of a reality check for us all – we are entering the adult world and to be perfectly honest, we’re not huge fans. This isn’t how we thought life would be, these things aren’t meant to happen, what are we doing wrong to be unable to cope with life as effortlessly as it seems everyone else does?

As medical students working with people in hospital we are often faced with the sufferings of others, people who are often going through the tougher times of their life. It is overwhelmingly clear that life isn’t easy, and I have recently been wondering why we ever thought it would be?

It seems that many of us are walking through life holding onto the idea that we should have everything under control, that we should be coping brilliantly with life but somehow feel like we are just scraping through. Even though we know in our heads that life isn’t fair and that bad things happen, the message doesn’t quite seem to have reached our hearts. Our closely held expectation of life isn’t matching the reality we see.

So where did we get this expectation from?

A Reflection of our Desires

This idea that our lives should be going a certain way, our measure of success in relationships, careers and everything else is all too often feed to us by the media and world around us. We find this idea everywhere because it is a reflection of our desires. We were created for greatness, to live in a perfect world in full unity with God. This is what our hearts yearn for because it is in our nature, however the reality is that we are living in a fallen world, original sin has entered and with it comes suffering and struggles.

Of course we want a happy ending, a fairy-tale romance, the dream job and the miracle cure, but so often we forget that to experience highs in life there must be lows. Our suffering has meaning and we are able to make it through these hardships with the help of God and others around us, but it is a part of our lives and we cannot ever completely avoid it nor ignore it.

Life as a Performance

I was told in class recently that training in medicine is very much a performance sport; you will often not know what you’re doing, be nervous and unsure but people are watching, trusting and expecting so you really just have to fake it ’til you make it. I think this is the way a lot of people treat life – it’s all about the performance.

We present these ideas of a ‘perfect life’ to each other, so rarely letting others see the more difficult or messy parts of our lives. In doing this we continue to encourage the cycle of believing we must be doing something wrong if our life isn’t ‘under control’. We are all guilty of it; our facebook pages are full of smiling photos, fun adventures and everyday triumphs. We love to share our success but not our struggles. How often have you answered “good” when asked how you are, but really you are stressed, exhausted, angry, hurt, lonely…

Letting people in.

We are so afraid to be the one to admit that we are struggling, that we don’t have things sorted. If we open up a little, let others in and be honest with ourselves and those we are close to it can destroy this pressure to be succeeding constantly. We realise that everyone is going through struggles, we feel less alone and often can actually find that as a team we can solve issues far better than anyone could while battling away alone. Give it a go; grab a coffee, share a tub of icecream, have the girls over for wine and actually talk about what’s going on – not just the surface stuff.

Our expectations of life might not be matching the reality of what we’re living, but that does not mean it’s not worth the struggles. We all have hard times and we all have great times, but the reality is that we are all here going through it together.

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