Do hard things
Risks worth taking
Today would have been our son Hugh's 22nd birthday. He died at eight hours old, of idiopathic pulmonary hypertension. And today, a little in his honour, I took a teaching risk that could've gone horribly wrong in a number of ways, and didn't.
I gave a speech to my Year Nine English class, as part of a unit we've been studying called "Words that Change the World." We've been looking at classic speeches, figuring out what makes them powerful and then writing our own. Last week I told them I'd give them an example of a speech I'd written myself, using some of the techniques we'd spoken about in class, and we'd analyse it together afterwards. Free rein.
So this morning, I turned up with my palm cards.
"This speech is really pretty personal, and it's going to be a hard one for me to get through," I told them. "And I really appreciate the fact that you lot have shown me throughout this year that you have the maturity to handle it, and the wisdom to take on board these complex ideas. If something here makes you react in a way that's difficult for you, try to keep it contained so that your friends can stay focussed. And thank you team, for being the kind of class where it's okay to talk about these things."
A note to my readers - at least a third of my class are Completely Classic Year Nine, and you know exactly what I mean when I say this. If you can keep them in their seats, without interupting you every thirty seconds, you've had an absolute win.
They are not mature. They do not have wisdom. They will definitely not know quite what to do with this content. Making this speech was pretty risky, and we all knew it.
By this time they were all utterly focused, and I could see them thinking "WHAT TF IS MISS ABOUT TO SAY TO US??"
So this, below, is what I said.
Twenty-two years ago, at pretty much exactly this time, one of the best days of my life turned into one of the worst.
Our baby son Hugh had been born around 6 in the morning. He was a broad shouldered, blue eyed little guy and we were absolutely stoked to meet him after nine long months of pregnancy. I put in the call to my mum that he was finally here and asked them to come up with our three-year-old daughter Jem to meet him as soon as they could.
But by the time they arrived, we knew that something was seriously wrong. Hughie had perfectly formed lungs and heart, but he couldn’t process oxygen on his own. He was being kept alive in the intensive care unit while specialists desperately tried to figure out what was wrong.
They couldn’t. And eight hours later he died.
It was one of those whiplash events where the worst possible thing happens, out of the blue.
I don’t know, maybe some of you have also faced something like this and know that feeling, and the blackness that comes over you afterwards? But if you haven’t experienced it, the bad news is that you probably will, somewhere, sometime. That’s the nature of life. No one escapes these things
So how do people survive the darkest days of their lives?
It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot. Psychologists, and the Oxley diary, will tell you that it’s all about resilience. But what is that boring-sounding word, really, and how do you get it?
I think of resilience as the muscle you need in order to lift what’s heavy, over and over again.
Lift the heaviness of feeling left out, or lonely, or the heaviness of your parents separating.
Lift the heaviness of being frustrated by getting another bloody B when you worked so hard for an A.
Lift the heaviness of being pole-axed by sorrow when the librarian lights up with a great big smile at the sight of your flat belly the week after and asks is the new baby at home with Dad?
Resilience is the muscle that gets you out of bed after the worst day of your life, and every morning after that. And muscles, as we all know, are built by lifting smaller, heavier things, day after day after day.
We survive really hard things by doing smaller hard things, over and over.
It’s pretty simple.
The problem with modern life is that we’re all obsessed with getting rid of hard things.
I see this in you guys all the time – I set some work and lots of you instantly look for the fastest, easiest way you can possibly get it done. You hate the idea of sitting with discomfort, being forced to think quietly and push your brains to search for answers.
And you’re not the only ones – billions of dollars are spent every year trying to make our lives easier and more comfortable. We’re all completely addicted to avoiding the hard stuff.
But comfort can be deadly.
Modern writers and thinkers in books like Dopamine World and on podcasts like The Huberman Lab talk about the way that removing discomfort and challenge from our lives literally deprives us of everything we need for our brains and bodies to grow. It’s like trying to build a muscle while removing all the weights from the gym. When there’s nothing for us to push against, we can’t build our strength, and that means no success for us to celebrate, and no evidence that we can survive hardship.
And that evidence is only built by doing hard things.
I can imagine you wondering exactly what kind of ‘hard things’ a person could possibly do in advance to build the resilience needed to survive the death of your child, or a hundred other awful things that happen to people. For me, I think it came down to three things: working hard on my head, my heart and my relationships.
First, my head. When I was younger, I worked really hard on my mind. I read. I asked questions. I wrote about the things that bothered me. I talked with others about big ideas of life and death and suffering and pain. And when those questions came for me – and trust me, after Hugh’s death, they did – my mind was a bit more ready to deal with them.
But I also worked hard on my heart. I found the things that really lit me up and brought me joy and I did them, as often as I could. I made my feelings my friends and found ways to feel them and talk about them with others. Believe me, strong hearts are critical.
And I worked hard on my relationships. I probably don’t need to tell you, because you’re in Year 9, that friendships can be tough. It’s so hard to persevere with finding your people, forgive them when things go wrong, show up for them when you just don’t want to. It’s just a real, real grind. But again, when the darkest day of your life turns up, the work you’ve put into building your friends and family will hold you up in ways you could never imagine.
Maybe some of you are wondering why on earth your Year 9 English teacher would make such a personal speech on her son’s 22nd birthday. Well, it’s because even though he’s not here physically to celebrate it, Hugh’s always with me in the way I show up in the world.
Hugh's name means heart, mind and spirit. And you know, we teachers get into teaching in the first place because among other things, we actually want you, our students, to be okay on the worst days of your life.
We’re genuinely interested in you. We want to help you get ready for the world and all it has for you.
So if you take anything from me as your English teacher, take this: do the hard things. Look after your heads, your hearts and your friends. Build your muscle and start now.
You’ve got the chance to live. Go do it well.
There was a short silence when I finished. Then someone clapped. Then they all clapped. And we were all a bit embarrassed and awkward and wow, that was quite a lot hey!
But what had struck me throughout the whole thing was that almost every kid in the place had their eyes on me the whole time, and they were still, and they were totally locked in: moved, confronted, uncomfortable, sad, compassionate, respectful. I loved that they seemed to resonate with and respect the content, that it might stick with them. Even more, I loved that they completely rose to the occasion.
When we critiqued the speech - ethos, pathos, logos, rhetorical devices, tone, expression, gestures, pace, eye contact - every single student had something to add. And when I asked who wanted to take another crack at making their draft speech deeper, wider, better and who wanted to practise their delivery, they were on it immediately.
It was like they knew I'd trusted then with something important, and they wanted to give me something important back. They were ready to show up for themselves, and for me, partly because they knew they'd been seen in a way they didn't always see themselves.
Every teacher knows this is not a magic trick. You work with students all year, especially the spicy ones, with quiet humour and dignity and a lot of patience. But the whole thing reinforces for me, once again, how that investment is worth it when you see them transform because they've been treated not as who they are right now, but who they can be with the right love and attention.
I think that's what education is about, at its heart. The books, the poetry, the speeches - they're all waiting to be discovered. Helping kids discover a corner of themselves they didn't know existed- maybe that's where the real magic happens.
Risky, yes. Worth it? 1000 times over.
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