Before we get into this, it’s important to understand just how much I depend on words.

I am someone for whom words come easily — I can fill a blank page or a quiet room with hundreds of words on command, without breaking a sweat. I write both for work and for pleasure, so spending a whole day tapping away at my keyboard while I stare fixedly at the same document on the screen is my idea of a very good time.

I became a writer however, not just because it’s fun to play with words, but because I believe in words. There is a profound power that exists in how we talk and write about our human experiences, the way words can build worlds or destroy them. They can irreparably wound but they can also heal. Language is like magic this way — it’s one of the many little bridges humans use to translate the singular, solitary experiences of our individual lives into something we can share. It’s how we solve problems, share wisdom, and find inspiration and information to help us overcome life’s most difficult challenges.

“The hardest-won lesson of my life is that, despite my faith in their ability to grasp, connect, and transform, there are times when words will fail us.”

Which is why the hardest-won lesson of my life is that, despite my faith in their ability to grasp, connect, and transform, there are times when words will fail us. 

I’m not talking about the cute moments, when your happiness or love is just too big for these little made-up symbols and sounds we’ve assigned to try to express such things — we don’t typically need to fix anything about the good stuff, we just need to appreciate it. 

But in hard times, the failure of language can be devastating: We have a big problem! Surely the right conversation with the right person, or the exact right phrase typed into a search bar, or the right book is somewhere out there, waiting for us to come upon it in this exact hour of need. Right? 

I am truly annoyed beyond all reason to share that sometimes, words truly aren’t enough. 

Hitting a wall

All my life, whenever I’ve been confused or heartbroken or lonely or enraged, I have turned to words. I’ve taken to my journal to vent or scribble unsent letters, or scheduled a therapy session, or called my best friend and mom and husband to have essentially the same conversation three separate times, relying every time on my words to get me through. And they did! I never encountered a problem that words couldn’t help me name, navigate, process, and learn from.

“All my life, whenever I’ve been confused or heartbroken or lonely or enraged, I have turned to words.”

When my kid was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease last spring, my faith that words could fix anything went up in flames. Could I Google questions about medication and school aid forms? Sure. But would my kid still have an incurable, lifelong disease? Yes. What was there to say? How could words help, if they weren’t going to change this essential fact?

I was experiencing a maelstrom of emotions amidst massive lifestyle changes, and I couldn’t for the life of me find the motivation to talk about it. There were no words to say to my therapist, to my husband, to my mother, to my friends that would make sense of our new reality. The only words that mattered to me were logistical; what I was feeling would have to wait. There wasn’t time to process or consider or wonder or imagine. We had to focus on surviving. 

“The only words that mattered to me were logistical; what I was feeling would have to wait.”

What I couldn’t process with words started to show up in my body. I lost my appetite. I slept less than five hours a night, rarely consecutively. I lost a lot of weight very fast, and kept forgetting words mid-sentence. I had the sort of brain fog I’d only ever read about on WebMD during those late night, ill-advised Internet rabbit holes that lead you to think you have a rare, 18th-century disease. Cognitive behavioral therapy wasn’t helping, and all the other tools I’d leaned on in the past (journaling, yoga, walks, rest, quality time with loved ones) felt like the most frivolous luxuries amidst my new medical responsibilities. Any time someone told me to get some rest, the same indignation would rear up in my chest. “I only have the most tenuous grasp on my child’s illness! I’m treating her largely with guesses, and you want me to nap?”  

When I started having panic attacks with an intensity and regularity that I could no longer hide, it became clear that I could no longer avoid my own feelings. But if words weren’t available to me, what were my options? 

“Sometimes the only way out is through: You have to find a way to keep going.”

When you’ve experienced the alchemy of words — the wisdom that clarifies a life lesson, the phrase that motivates or grounds you, the loving observation that fundamentally altered your sense of self for the better — it can feel like a total betrayal to find yourself in a season of hardship only to discover that no amount of thinking or talking or reading has the power to help. Whether it’s a transition or a loss, an unalterable event or even just the sheer bad luck of a bout of depression, sometimes the only way out is through: You have to find a way to keep going, even as very little about it seems to change.

Everyone and every situation will call for different tools to get through. For me, it ended up being a combination of an SSRI and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). I also dropped a lot (a LOT) of other balls, stripping my days to the barest possible essentials. And, honestly, the thing that’s always part of the healing equation, the thing we can’t do much about but just to remember that it’s there: The passage of time. 

Finding new tools

The months following our kid’s diagnosis was, hands down, the hardest period of my life. (And for context, my dad died of AIDS in 2000. I am not a stranger to hard times.) Yet, I made it through this period without words.

“While words failed to pull me through this time, the experience has taught me that they are a mostly reliable tool — but not the only one.”

Looking back, I think words could have possibly only complicated things, potentially even caused us more harm than good. My grief came in one of its favorite disguises, wrapped up in an anger so palpable and potent that, had I insisted on trying to find my words, I might have been led to the ones that tended to hurt instead of heal. 

So while words failed to pull me through this time, the experience has taught me that they are a mostly reliable tool — but not the only one. Everytime we make it through a difficult season though, we come out with new tools to rely on for the next time. 

Here are some of the lessons I’m taking with me for the next hard time, when I’ll need to find the right tools to help me keep going:

1. Tend to your body

Self-care during hard times can seem impossible, and of course it is also essential. But the self-care habits during hard times aren’t about enjoyment or pleasure, but simply tending to your most basic human needs. You might be familiar with Maszlow’s Hierarchy — we’re looking at the base of the pyramid here. We’re talking about self-care to survive.

  • Eat enough food: Eating regularly can be a real chore when you’re struggling, so choosing foods based on nutrients and convenience is a huge help: protein bars, smoothies, and pre-packaged bone broth were all I was able to manage when I had no appetite. Set an alarm for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 
  • Hydrate like crazy: This is so important, especially if you’re experiencing a lot of crying or GI issues from the stress. Grief, especially, can make you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus, and dehydration only compounds physical achiness as your lower blood volume makes muscles sore and hard to move. Electrolytes are the best way to ensure you’re optimizing your hydration, so whether you supplement (our family is a huge fan of Buoy) or drink coconut water or another favorite option, don’t skip it. 
  • Rest: Even though sleeplessness can be more common during hard times, staying in bed during designated sleep hours is still rest for your body. So don’t get up and do something else. Every little bit of rest is better than nothing. 
  • Get Vitamin D — outside: Set a timer for a minimum of five minutes and stand in the sunshine every day. The ideal amount of time is to spend 20 minutes exposing as much skin (without sunscreen) as possible to the sun, but our bar is very, very low during hard times. Five minutes is enough. 
  • Keep a bare bones hygiene routine: Change your clothes every day. Brush your teeth and wash your face. Even if you skip your full bathing routine, don’t let yourself skip these things. Sometimes feeling extra grimy on top of everything else can be the last straw, and destroy what little motivation or energy you were able to muster that day. 
  • If you can, move: Go for a walk, even if just around the block. Walk up and down your stairs. Turn on very loud music and throw your body around in instinctive, wild ways. Do 50 jumping jacks, or 20 burpees. Find somatic exercises on YouTube. Breathe. 

2. Radically simplify your life

We all juggle so much these days, from work to family to friends to hobbies to a trillion little details required of all adult humans living at this moment in time. During hard times, give yourself permission to cut some of these things from your to-do list. Because here’s the thing: you will probably end up dropping a lot of this stuff anyway. Having a plan to simplify your day-to-day will make this feel less chaotic and a little easier all around.

  • Streamline your work: Be realistic about your abilities, and take on only what you can truly manage. Take the time off for everything else if you can. If you can’t, talk with a supervisor or colleague you trust to figure out where there might be wiggle room. 
  • Look only at the step in front of you: Instead of being proactive on twenty different fronts, I started dealing only with the very next task or deadline in front of me. What I learned is that this generally works out fine. Every once in a while it might cause a scramble (like when I didn’t read about the class Valentine’s party until the night before) but because I wasn’t juggling my usual load of responsibilities, I just went to the store at a weird hour and it was fine. The class got a big bag of Lindor truffles and we all moved on with our lives.
  • Assign a liaison: Depending on the details of what you’re going through, you might have friends or family wanting updates or trying to check in and offer help. This can feel overwhelming when you’re struggling — it can be hard to share information multiple times, or to manage people’s offers of help when you’re barely able to change your shirt every day. So choose someone you’re close with that you can trust to be your communication liaison. They can manage sharing updates or coordinating help or simply letting people know you’re okay. 
  • Give yourself grace: You will drop the ball for something you didn’t mean to, or something that will be hard to fix. Don’t take on external problems if you don’t have to right now. Be honest about where you are and what your bandwidth truly is, both with yourself and to others. And when something slips through the cracks, own it, and move on. Do not wallow or waste time kicking yourself while you’re down. 

3. Let emotions run their course, without running your life

You know that old marriage advice about never going to bed angry? I was a dedicated follower of this mandate for nearly a decade, despite all evidence suggesting that sometimes, staying up until 3 a.m. to force a resolution had more harmful impacts than if we’d just gotten a good night’s sleep. It took a family medical emergency to tip us into letting go of the fear of what it would mean to go to bed mad, and I’m here to tell you something wild: It made our relationship stronger! Because often, the argument was a symptom of our mutual stress and exhaustion — which could only be addressed with rest. 

“Making room for big feelings means not treating our relationship as a fragile, delicate thing threatened by normal human responses to stress.”

By saying to each other “Hey, I think we should table this for tonight and focus on getting some sleep. If we’re still feeling this way tomorrow, let’s talk about it then,” we were exhibiting a trust that was notably absent from the panicked insistence on staying awake until everyone was “happy” again. Making room for big feelings means not treating our relationship as a fragile, delicate thing threatened by normal human responses to stress. As we got better at being able to identify when there was a real problem we needed to address versus the venting of built-up pressure, it also made it feel less urgent to pick a fight when the latter was the case. We can just say that we’re feeling grouchy and exhausted and then go do something that helps with that, instead of getting into a big dumb fight about something else entirely. 

Here are some of the coping mechanisms we’ve turned to when we’ve felt our emotions running high during hard times:

  • Movement: My husband ran a lot during the months after diagnosis. It was the only time he felt like he could really release his emotions, pushing his body until he could feel the internal pressure alleviate. Fair warning: He said he ended up crying alot on these runs, so keep that in mind if you’re somewhere public.  
  • Physical chores: Sometimes venting through repetitive, physical labor was infinitely more helpful than yelling, crying, or talking. Weeding and pruning were some of my favorite things to do when I was overrun with strong feelings. Doing a deep dive of the kitchen or the bathroom, something that allowed me to scrub furiously, was also helpful. I could get lost in the task and have a break from my mental spirals.
  • Screaming: Our therapist is a big fan of this and I have to admit, letting out a true primal, guttural roar when there is just nothing to say but you’re feeling it all anyway is, well, a classic for a reason. We use our basement, and depending on who’s home either just let it out or scream into a pillow. Don’t hold back, and keep going until you feel your heart rate slow. 
  • Focus on another sensation: This is a mindfulness-based practice that I found really helpful when the other options weren’t available to me. Sometimes I could simply breathe in a scent I found really soothing, like a peppermint oil, until the feelings passed. Other times, I’d need something more distracting, like holding a wall-sit or a plank for three minutes. Forcing my mind to focus on the physical sensation could sometimes disrupt my chaotic feelings enough to calm me down. 
  • Temperature: In DBT, I learned that plunging my face into ice cold water triggers the mammalian dive reflex, which signals our bodies to slow our heart rate down to conserve oxygen. This was one of the most instantly effective techniques I’ve ever used for stopping panic attacks. In a pinch, putting ice cubes or even cold glasses of water to the skin beneath my eyes has done the trick. If cold isn’t your thing, standing in a scalding hot shower was also a huge help.
  • Take a break: Make zero decisions when your emotions are running high. Trust none of the words that come out of your mind or mouth. Treat them like grumpy little patrons, demanding to see the manager. Hear them out, and then send them on their way. 
  • Self-soothe: In hard times, our bodies are in states of hypervigilance nearly all of the time. So while it’s important to tend to all our survival needs, sometimes you also need to have something to help you recover, something that signals comfort and safety to you. It’s the perfect time to reread your favorite cozy book series or rewatch your favorite TV series in its entirety. Do whatever allows you to fully check out of the state of stress and emergency at the end of the day, guilt-free.

4. Find a mantra

Here’s the part where I’m going to reveal that there actually were some words that helped a bit during this period. They were: 

  • It won’t always feel like this. 
  • The only way out is through. 

My husband and I would say these things to each other when the other one was in the thick of it, when there was no magical phrase to utter that would change a damn thing about the situation. These words were our reminders to ourselves and each other to keep going, to choose to believe that continuing on would deliver us at some point to the other side. 

“Find something that you can say to yourself as a reminder to keep going, when all other words simply aren’t enough.”

Find something that you can say to yourself as a reminder to keep going, when all other words simply aren’t enough. Other mantras I like:

  • My life is about more than this moment.
  • I can do hard things.
  • Feelings are not facts.
  • Life can still be good with pain.
  • I’m learning so much from this.
  • I deserve to rest.
  • All seasons change.

We wouldn’t know what to expect at the other side of the season we were in, but we could be sure that the season was going to end at some point. It wasn’t going to feel the way we were feeling right in that moment forever. This is something we both know is true from life: We can count on change. We can count on the evolution of, if not just ourselves, the world around us. ✨

What are some tools that have helped you endure hard times? What lessons did you take with you into the next season of life? Please let us know in the comments!

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.