For some folks, life is a hill

in the November 29 New York Times, Charles Blow wrote about the difficulties children of poverty have accomplishing life goals when compared to the children of affluence. He used the idea of the hill:

For some folks, life is a hill. You can either climb or stay at the bottom.

It’s not fair. It’s not right. But it is so. Some folks are born halfway up the hill and others on the top. The rest of us are not. Life doles out favors in differing measures, often as a result of historical injustice and systematic bias. That’s a hurtful fact, one that must be changed. We should all work toward that change.

In the meantime, until that change is real, what to do if life gives you the hill?

You can curse it. You can work hard to erode it. You can try to find a way around it. Those are all understandable endeavors. Staying at the bottom is not.

You may be born at the bottom, but the bottom was not born in you. You have it within you to be better than you were, to make more of your life than was given to you by life.

The kids I see in my practice were given hills. Their hills are not obvious. No one wants to believe they have hills. Not the young person. Not the parents. They can often get through high school without really having to become a hill climber. They can “pass” up to a point. They are bright young people with ADHD, learning differences, anxiety, and/or depression that they have managed just well enough to get by. And then, they find themselves out of high school. Success is now dependent on their daily behaviors and decisions. It never mattered too much before what they did on a daily basis. There was the structure of school and family to get them through.

When the fog lifts and the hills become apparent it is usually because dramatic failures have occurred. The failures in college look like not leaving the dorm room, skipping too many classes, not doing the work, gaming all night, being afraid to talk to professors, and also, too much partying. GPA’s of 0.75 are hard to rationalize, much less recover from. The failures expose the hills, but the hills have been there all along.

Learning to master hills along the way is an easier process than suddenly having to confront what now feels like crossing the Alps!