Everything is hard, pick your hard
Thoughts on building big dreams and the final season of The Bear
I’ve been thinking about and building towards the same dream for over a decade. Honestly? It’s probably closer to two decades.
Everyday I’ve woken up with ideas, tried to act on them with the resources I had at the time, got it wrong, tried to fix it, and done that over and over and over again for years.
It didn’t subconsciously feel like work back then, because I often didn’t know if what I was doing was working or if I was honing real skills, I was purely driven by passion. But then that passion met opportunity, and opportunity met demand, demand required me to be strategic, and I felt the heavy weight of what it actually takes to maintain your dream—every single day.
And to put it simply, it’s really fucking hard.
I’ve never been afraid of hard work, but even I can admit that I entered a creative career not really aware of what hard creative work felt like. How often times you can work really hard to make something beautiful that will go completely unacknowledged, and tomorrow you just have to do it all over again.
Yes, it’s an unforgiving roller coaster most days, but it’s also fulfilling in a way that no other experience has ever been able to compare to.
It’s hard, but so is everything else. And there’s a sense of peace I have knowing that I picked this hard.
I recently watched the last season of The Bear, a show I’ve loved so much I cry at scenes that no one else cries at, and it helped solidify this idea for me. Even the craft you fought for, even the work you do surrounded by people you love, even when you get the tools to learn and get better, even when you meet the love of your life in a kitchen—it’s still hard.
But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that it’s not in perfect alignment with you.
What I loved the most about that show is that it gave an unfiltered view at what happens when pure creativity turns into ambition, and all of a sudden you’ve lost the sense of yourself in a booming business that’s simultaneously still failing. Which is exactly what being a person with creative dreams feels like.
Carmy and Syd are both halves of myself that I know very well. The urge to chase higher education and training with the best to feel some sense of validity in your talent, mixed in with a natural inclination to never want to put your ambitions above the people around you. Just to find out that they will always come second anyways.
I understood Carmy’s panic attacks while being locked in a fridge, the same way I understood Sydney’s hesitancy to accept that she was actually smarter than her mentor but didn’t know how to own it. Both were two people who were giving everything to the dream, who met its hardness in different, crushing ways.
Still the desire to create intricately with food never left. It was hard but it was worth it.
I’ve worked many jobs in my life, I’ve been a teacher to a rowdy class of middle schoolers, I’ve taken orders at a restaurant, I’ve worked with crazy freelance clients, I launched a media company, I’ve taken a year off to live strictly off my art, I’ve done corporate, I’m now in the midst of living as a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, and all of it was hard it in its own way. But very few felt fulfilling.
On a personal note, I’m sure being a parent will also be hard, being married will be hard, being a caregiver will be hard. Being a sibling, daughter, and aunt will get harder and harder as my family gets older. Hardness is not something we can escape even when our prayers are answered perfectly, so the focus then becomes what hard is worth choosing?
This topic comes up often between millennials and Gen Z, because millennials are the descendants of generations who did it the hard way regardless of passion, and Gen Z is choosing themselves over insane work ethic. Both are incredibly ambitious groups who are choosing to go about their dreams in different ways, but none of us are immune to hard.
I get a lot of questions from younger, aspiring creatives and I can hear their eagerness to avoid the capitalist rigamarole called a workforce we’re all forced to navigate, but I’ve never avoided the truth of what really awaits them.
I tell them this:
Take time to know what you want to do, because any dream will be one you bleed and sweat for. That doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to set boundaries, leave ruthless environments, pivot, or start your own things in spite of it all. That doesn’t mean you won’t find joy in the work. But it does mean, that there is no path forward that comes with the absence of hard work.
So now let’s get back to the question: What hard is worth choosing?
Well first, if it’s something you’re always thinking about, like every single day? Pick that hard. I’m thinking of that moment in Sister Act 2 when Sister Mary Clarence tells Rita that if you wake up in the morning thinking about it, you’re supposed to be doing it.
If it’s something that you don’t see a deadline on, meaning it feels like infinite, forever work just because it speaks to you that deeply? Pick that hard.
If you feel like you’re surrounded by people (and sometimes just one or two people) who cement you, pour into you like your pour into them, and all of you are in a space you feel you can truly grow in? Pick that hard.
(Lord knows I’m no love expert but) if you meet a person that lights you up, makes you feel safe, inspired, AND brings resources topped with the cherry of their out loud intentions for you? Pick that hard. Even if just for a minute.
What I’m basically saying is, there is no escape from carrying the weight and responsibility for the thing, the craft, the job, the love that you asked for.
So all we can do is recognize when that hard is more grief than reward, and/or when that hard is no longer serving us as we evolve.
But behind every dream, every joy, and every love is hard. We just have to pick the things that feel worth it.
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The title of this piece reminds me of this quote by Toni Morisson: “Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilities; it's choosing the ones you want.”
I definitely spiral between being ready to do the hard work of artmaking and wanting it to be easy and fall in my lap. I remember when I was promoted at my job and I became the leader of a team of writers, editors, and designers. As I saw how hard we worked to bring content to our clients, I thought to myself: I’m not working hard enough for myself.
As a writer, I was like, whoa. I have to grind harder. And it worked, but I also burnt myself out, so it’s a dance. But I love the idea of owning your freedom. Not wanting to do the work is kind of like saying you don’t want the freedom. Which is bringing me to another iconic quote. This one is from Debbie Allen’s character as the dance teacher on Fame. She told all those aspiring dancers: “You've got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying in sweat.”
Sweating for ourselves is so much sweeter than sweating for someone else!
I think a lot of creatives/artists get shamed for walking away from the "acceptable" kind of hard. As if choosing a less conventional path means we're avoiding “real work”, when it often feels like the pursuit of a creative career, and the uncertainty that comes with it, is as hard as it gets😅