I’ve never fully loved the saying “choose your hard.”
I understand why people connect with it. The phrase is usually intended to be motivating. The message is often something along the lines of: staying stuck is hard, but change is hard too, so you may as well choose the hard thing that moves your life forward.
And to be fair, there is truth in that.
Healing can be hard. Setting boundaries can be hard. Leaving unhealthy situations can be hard. Learning new skills, tolerating discomfort, grieving losses, having difficult conversations, changing long-standing patterns, or starting over professionally can all be incredibly difficult.
But despite understanding the intention behind the phrase, I often find it lands poorly, especially for people already struggling. It can carry a subtle “just get over it” energy to it. A kind of oversimplified toughness that ignores how complex many people’s realities actually are.
Because sometimes the “hard” someone is experiencing is not the result of a simple choice at all.
Not Everything Difficult Is a Choice
Illness is hard. Grief is hard. Layoffs are hard. Financial instability is hard. Discrimination is hard. Trauma is hard. Chronic stress is hard. Caring for aging parents while raising children is hard. Living in a body or brain that is struggling is hard.
Many of the painful things people navigate are shaped by circumstances far outside their control. Systems. Timing. Health. Family history. Privilege. Economic realities. Other people’s behaviour. Plain bad luck.
Yet many of us walk around carrying the belief that we are entirely responsible for our circumstances and emotional struggles. That if we were just stronger, smarter, more disciplined, more positive, more resilient, or somehow “better,” we would have figured it all out by now.
That belief creates an enormous amount of shame.
I see this often in therapy. People minimizing their own suffering because they think they should have been able to prevent it, solve it faster, or cope with it more gracefully. They judge themselves harshly for struggling with situations that would challenge almost anyone.
Sometimes phrases like “choose your hard” unintentionally reinforce this idea that life is mostly a matter of personal choice and mindset. And while mindset absolutely matters, reducing human suffering to individual choice often overlooks the broader context people are living within.
Human beings do not exist in a vacuum.
What We Can Choose
That said, I do think the phrase points toward something important: agency.
Not necessarily agency over what happens to us, but agency over how we respond to what happens to us. And that distinction matters.
We may not get to choose whether we experience grief, disappointment, rejection, illness, anxiety, burnout, or uncertainty. But over time, we often do have some choice in how we relate to those experiences. We can gradually learn different coping strategies. We can ask for help. We can build insight into our patterns. We can practice tolerating discomfort instead of avoiding it. We can set boundaries. We can stop abandoning ourselves in order to please other people.
None of those things are easy.
In fact, personal growth is often profoundly uncomfortable. Healing rarely feels elegant while it’s happening. Learning to do things differently can temporarily feel worse before it feels better. There is a reason people stay in familiar patterns, even painful ones: familiarity often feels safer than change.
This is where I think the deeper wisdom behind “choose your hard” actually lives.
Not in pretending suffering is optional. Not in blaming people for their circumstances. Not in bypassing pain with motivational slogans. But in recognizing that while life inevitably contains difficulty, we sometimes have opportunities to choose which kinds of difficulty align more closely with the life we want to build.
Avoiding conflict may feel easier in the short term, but constantly silencing yourself is hard too. Staying in a job that is crushing your mental health may feel safer than making a change, but living disconnected from yourself is also hard. Never risking failure protects us from disappointment, but it can also keep us trapped in lives that no longer fit.
The goal is not to pretend every hardship is chosen. The goal is to recognize that even within painful, unfair, or difficult circumstances, people often still retain some capacity for choice, agency, and movement.
And sometimes that movement starts not with blaming ourselves for struggling, but with approaching our struggles with a little more honesty, compassion, and nuance.
