The Hard Things

I failed out of college.
I stopped eating.
I got married when I shouldn’t have.
And still, I built something good.
This is what the hard things taught me.

---

I couldn’t wait to leave this town.
I don’t even remember why I hated it, only that eighteen-year-old me was certain freedom lived anywhere but home. Back then, you think life will go your way just because you’ve decided it will.

I was going to be a history teacher, the thing my dad had always wanted to be but never was. I had a plan. My best friend and I were supposed to move to Gunnison together, share a dorm, live out the dream. But a week before we left, she backed out. Just like that, my security blanket was gone.

I remember begging both my parents.
“Please don’t make me go,” I begged.

Looking back, now that I'm a mother myself I know how hard it was for my mom to tell me I had to go. So, I would look to my dad for the answer I wanted. He looked at me for a long time and said,
“Raina Jo, nothing is going to be easy from here on out, sometimes you just have to do the hard things.”

I didn’t know then that those words would follow me through almost every season of my life.

So I went. Terrified, but I went.

The night before move-in, we stayed in a creaky little motel beside a creek. I remember lying in that bed, praying I could vanish before morning. But morning came anyway. My parents and sister helped carry my life up three flights of stairs, hugged me goodbye, and drove away.

For the first time, I wasn’t included. I was alone.
And I was about to learn what hard really meant.

---

College wasn’t what I dreamed. My roommate never showed. I never really made friends. And slowly, I started to disappear.

The loneliness crept in quietly at first, missed meals, skipped classes, until it became something heavier, something that lived in my chest. I was suffering from a kind of fear I didn’t have a name for yet. Later I’d learn it was depression and anxiety, but back then it just felt like failure, like I was broken in some way no one could see.

I’d go days without eating because the thought of walking into the cafeteria made my heart race. I’d wait until the halls were empty before slinking outside to smoke a cigarette, my one small act of control, or maybe escape. The world beyond my dorm door felt impossible, like it was moving on without me.

One night, I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the door, wanting to leave but unable to make my body move. That’s when I realized fear doesn’t always scream, sometimes it just sits beside you, quiet and patient, until you stop trying altogether.

The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed, not because I was lazy or sick, but because something inside me had gone quiet. The kind of quiet that hums beneath your skin and makes the air feel too heavy to breathe.

I stayed there for days, curtains drawn, phone on silent, watching the light shift across the walls until it was gone.
After that, I stopped going to class altogether.

I didn’t know it then, but that silence was the sound of everything I believed about myself starting to fall apart.
And that was one of the first truly hard things — facing myself and realizing I wasn’t okay.

No one knew any of this. Not even my mom.
Until now.

---

By the end of the year, I’d failed out (obviously). I packed up and drove home, humiliated and hollow, trying to make sense of what came next.

What came next was life.
A new job. My own place to live. And eventually, a relationship and a marriage that should never have happened.
Twelve years of trying to turn chaos into stability. A blur of growing up while still falling apart.

Each season brought its own kind of hard. The kind that doesn’t show up in pictures. The kind where you smile through pain, and build a routine out of survival.

But out of that storm came three kids. My kids. 
The only unshakable good that survived the wreckage.
Loving them, raising them, holding it together when I wanted to fall apart — that was hard too, but it was a different kind of hard, the kind that builds you instead of breaking you. I was also blessed with an amazing bonus son who if I had it all over again I would have never left behind. 

Then came another hard thing, the hardest one yet.
Losing my dad.
The man who taught me to face the world, who pushed me out into it when I was scared, who always believed I’d find my way back.

Then in a new season of life, God gave me a second chance at love and blessed us with a little boy, I have also been blessed with two bonus kids who have taught me a lot about myself, love, and life.

---

Now my oldest is eighteen, graduating in May.
And I catch myself holding my breath, afraid he’ll leave and never look back.

But then I remember,
He’s supposed to.
That’s the point.
That’s one of life’s hard things too, letting them go.

You grow by going, by falling, by failing.
You screw things up, college, marriage, life itself, and then, in the wreckage, you start collecting pieces.
Lessons. Some small. Some sharp. Some you don’t even recognize until years later.
But eventually, they stack into something solid, resilience, grit, maybe even grace.

That’s what my parents were teaching me all along, not that everything happens for a reason, but that you make your own reason out of what’s left.
You do the hard things. You keep standing. You keep showing up.

As my dad used to say,
“It’s a good life if you don’t get weak.”

It took me nearly forty years to understand that.

This life isn’t easy, but it’s mine.
I’m doing work I love, raising kids who make me proud, living in a place that once felt like nowhere and now feels like home.

I used to think strength meant never screwing up, never falling apart.
Now I know better.

Sometimes you just have to do the hard things.
And if you do them,
even when you’re scared, even when you’re breaking,
they shape you into someone stronger than you ever thought you could be.

For my dad,
who taught me how to do the hard things.