There is a particular kind of coffee meeting where you go in thinking you are catching up with a friend and come out realizing you just had a therapy session you did not schedule or budget for.
That was my Tuesday morning about a month ago.
My friend and I were doing the usual update on work and life, the kind of conversation where you both quietly take stock of where things are. She works for an architecture firm. I run my own business.
At some point I started talking about rejections, fee proposals that go nowhere, magazine submissions that get ignored, networking emails that vanish without a trace. One word led to another and I told her, with full conviction, that I was suffering from the day-to-day reality of running a business.
She listened, waited, and then said, “You are not suffering. You are struggling.”
I did not immediately see the difference. Honestly, I was too irritated to look for one.
The gap between those two words is larger than it seems.
Suffering is passive.
It is something that happens to you, something you absorb and endure while standing still. Struggling is active. It is something you do, movement through difficulty even when the destination is unclear.
When my friend pushed back on my word choice, she was pointing out something I had completely missed: I had spent days preparing those proposals. I had been working, adjusting, trying.
The outcome was not what I wanted, but the effort was real, and I had been erasing the effort because of the outcome. That is not an honest accounting of what actually happened.
I thought of a design student I taught years ago who was convinced he was stuck. He could not find a clear connection between his written thesis statement and his visual design concept, and he interpreted that gap as paralysis.
He told me he was suffering from a lack of progress.
But when I looked at his work across the semester, I saw dozens of iterations. He was moving constantly; he just could not feel it from where he was standing. He was doing the active work of finding where his project wanted to go, even while it felt like standing still.
The problem was not his effort. The problem was how he was reading his own effort.
I recognized myself immediately, which was uncomfortable in the way that useful things often are.
Purpose does not make hard things easy, but it changes what hard things mean.
Struggling with something you have chosen requires a reason to keep going.
Without a clear sense of purpose, difficulty just feels like punishment.
I have seen this most clearly in my own writing, which has never come easily and probably never will.
Years ago I decided the way to address my resistance to writing was to become a blogger, which in retrospect sits somewhere between inspired solution and elaborate self-torture, and I remain genuinely unsure which.
Every week for years I have sat down on Sunday afternoons to write, and the blank page has never once greeted me warmly. The resistance is still there. But the routine became familiar in a way the dread never quite did.
Sitting down to write stopped being something I avoided for days in advance and became simply something I do on Sunday afternoons, even if I still find it difficult when I get there.
The struggle did not disappear. It just stopped feeling like suffering because I understood why I was doing it.
Purpose does not make hard things easy. It makes hard things worth doing, which is a different thing entirely and honestly a more useful one.
The less flattering explanation for why I called it suffering.
When I look back at how I was experiencing those rejections, what I was really doing was making everything about myself in the least useful possible way.
Not in a confident, self-assured way, but in a quietly self-absorbed way. Every rejection became evidence of my specific failure. Every non-response was a verdict on my particular effort.
I had made myself so central to the outcome that I could not see the work I was actually doing, because the work was only real to me if it produced the result I wanted.
My friend called that suffering. I eventually called it something else.She smiled when I said the word selfishness.
Not unkindly, but with the expression of someone who had been waiting patiently for me to arrive at the obvious. The whole time I thought I was struggling with my business, I was mostly struggling with my own need to control outcomes I was never going to control.
The rejections were real. The work was real. The suffering, it turns out, was optional and largely self-generated.
Struggling means you are still in motion. Suffering means you have decided to stop and feel bad about it instead, which, if I am being honest about my Tuesday mornings, is occasionally more comfortable than it should be.
My friend did not charge me for any of this therapy session…well, I did pay with a cup of coffee:-)
Life Outside of Design Studio 