Choosing Discomfort: How Doing Hard Things on Purpose Can Reconnect You to Yourself

A reflection on agency, intentional challenge, and reclaiming your sense of self.

I love how doing something hard on purpose leaves me feeling confident, competent, capable of handling other hard things in my life.
I love how when life gets hard,
I crave the discomfort of a challenging hike.
I love how it grounds me.

— from my poem, "I Don't Love Many Things"

Two Kinds of Hard

There is the hard that life brings to us — uninvited, unasked for, sometimes devastating. Most of us know this kind intimately. It arrives without our permission and leaves its mark whether we are ready or not.

And then there is a different kind of hard. The kind we walk toward on purpose. The steep trail we choose. The cold water we step into anyway. The difficult thing we decide to do not because we have to, but because something in us is ready to try.

These two experiences of discomfort feel entirely different in the body. And that difference matters more than we might realize.

Why Choice Changes Everything

When discomfort is imposed on us — especially repeatedly, especially early in life — it can leave us feeling like life is something that happens to us. That we are passengers, not drivers. That our needs, our boundaries, our preferences don't ultimately matter. This is one of the quieter, deeper wounds that difficult experiences can leave behind.

For many people, these patterns can continue long after the original experiences have passed, shaping the nervous system and the way we move through the world. This is often part of what trauma therapy for PTSD and CPTSD begins to explore.

But when we choose the hard thing — even something small — something shifts.

We are no longer only at the mercy of difficulty.

We decided. We showed up. We stayed with it. And we came through.

That experience — of choosing, enduring, and surviving something difficult on our own terms — is one of the most direct pathways back to a sense of agency. The felt sense that we have some say in our own lives. That we are not only acted upon. That we can act.

The American Psychological Association also describes resilience as something that can be gradually strengthened over time through repeated experiences of adaptation and coping.

It Doesn't Have to Be a Mountain

Intentional challenge doesn't have to be dramatic or physical. It doesn't have to look like anything in particular. For one person it might be a long hike. For another it might be signing up for a class, having a conversation they've been putting off, or simply sitting with an uncomfortable feeling long enough to let it pass without running from it.

Sometimes the challenge is less about pushing harder, and more about slowly building the capacity to stay present with yourself. In many ways, this connects to the work of building emotional capacity — learning how to stay with difficult experiences without becoming completely overwhelmed by them.

What matters is not the form. What matters is the spirit of it — the moment of turning toward something difficult and saying:

I am choosing this.
I have some say here.

That moment, repeated over time, begins to rebuild something.

A quiet confidence. A growing trust in your own capacity. A sense — sometimes fragile at first, but real — that you can handle what comes.

A Gentle Invitation

This is not a call to push through pain or to add more weight to an already heavy life. If today is a day for rest, for gentleness, for simply getting through — that is enough. That is its own kind of courage.

But if there is a small part of you that feels ready — even just slightly — to reach toward something that challenges you, it might be worth asking:

What is one hard thing I could choose this week — not to prove anything, not to punish myself, but simply to remind myself that I have agency? That I can choose? That I can do hard things?

Sometimes healing begins not through massive change, but through small moments of choosing ourselves differently over time — small steps back toward the person we are becoming, and perhaps the person we were always meant to be.

You don't have to answer that question today. But it's worth keeping close.

If reclaiming a sense of agency is something you're working toward, therapy can be a powerful place to explore that — gently, and at your own pace. Whether through trauma-informed counselling, EMDR therapy, or simply having a space to reconnect with yourself, you don't have to navigate it alone.

If you'd like to connect, you're welcome to reach out.