Read the full transcript of award-winning author Holly Matthews’s talk titled “Tough Luck: Accepting Life’s Unfairness Will Set You Free”, at TEDxNewcastleCollege (Oct 7, 2019).
Listen to the audio version here:
Holly Matthews: How many people in here have already experienced some pain or suffering today? Have a think about your journey to get here today. We’ve got some hands up already. Think about your journey to get here today. You woke up this morning, maybe you had to drag yourself out of your comfy bed. That was definitely me this morning.
Perhaps you jumped in your car and you experienced some road rage as some idiot cut you off because that happened to me last week and it was really annoying. Has anybody been stuck in traffic on the way here today? Because there is nothing like the frustration of being bumper to bumper in rush hour traffic to get your blood pumping. Has anybody been offended today?
Has anyone been offended or had their feelings hurt? We do definitely have our feelings hurt. We’re sensitive, aren’t we? At any point today, have you found yourself scrolling through social media and had that pang of envy as you compared your life to perfect Instagram boy or girl’s life? We do that as well, don’t we?
It’s horrible. I imagine that everybody in this room has experienced some large or small feelings of pain or discomfort. And I know that some of you in this room have already been through some really tough stuff. In fact, I’m sure that there are many of you sat here today that are flat bang in the middle of huge challenges in your life. And if you have breezed through life to this point unscathed by some miracle, then I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re going to go through something awful as well.
And what a pleasant way to begin a TED Talk. But I actually do think there is something positive in this knowledge. Because if you can accept that pain and suffering are part of our human experience, that it is something that connects us all, that none of us are immune, then you can begin to build a really amazing life regardless of all the challenges that you know that you’re going to face. And that is powerful.
Life’s Contractions: Finding the In-Between Moments
When I was pregnant for the first time with my daughter Brooke, I did what I imagine a lot of expectant mothers do. And I started to imagine what it might be like to experience childbirth. And basing my knowledge of childbirth on what I had witnessed on hospital TV dramas, I was under the impression that I was about to experience constant agonizing pain. Now it hurt. I’m not going to be disillusioned, it stung a bit. But the reality, the reality for the most part is that we go through contractions.
So we’ll have a painful contraction. And then we get a moment just after. And then we get another painful contraction. And then a moment to catch your breath. Now our lives work in much the same way.
So we’ll have something tough happen. The breakup of a relationship, a job loss. And then we get a moment in between. And then in comes another painful bit, the death of somebody that we love, a trauma, a failure, and then a moment of downtime. Now, in order for us to lead a happy and fulfilled life, we need to start to recognize when we are in our in-between moments.
And sometimes they’re short, sometimes they feel really short. So we have to become alert and mindful. So that when we are in our in-between moments, we can pack them full of love and life and great experiences.
Victims vs. Survivors: Taking Responsibility
Now for some people, when they go through a difficult time, they can find themselves being labeled and then perhaps behaving like a victim of those circumstances. And I find the word victim really disempowering. And when you begin to behave like a victim, all you are doing is prolonging your pain and suffering. And you’re keeping yourself stuck.
Now there are some people that feel like a victim constantly. Life just really stings. You know, they’re the people that someone will order a round of coffee at work, and they’ll get accidentally missed off the order. Well, it’s the end of the world, isn’t it? And they will feel bullied, attacked, victimized. They’ll miss out on a car parking space in the car park, someone will zip in in front of them, really annoying. They’ll have to lap the car park.
But to them, the universe is against them, isn’t it? It will start to rain. And these people will feel like it’s deliberately raining just to annoy them. And then life will chuck them something really difficult. And it is just the icing on the cake for them. And they get to moan and groan and complain constantly.
Then on the flip side, we meet those people that really do seem to have been dealt a tough hand. And yet they seem to breeze through life from problem to problem, smiling, grateful, laughing through it all. The difference between those that play victim and those that don’t is the responsibility that they take for their own lives and their own happiness.
Mr and Mrs Victim, they wear their troubles like a badge of honor. It’s their excuse. It’s their reason. It’s their chance to just opt out. Take their hands off the wheel and just go, “I didn’t do anything. It’s not me. I didn’t do anything.” And there might seem something nice in that because it’s nice not to be responsible. It’s nice when it’s not our fault. But the downside to this behavior is that if you behave like this, you’ll never truly be happy.
You will never truly feel satisfied. And your victim tinted glasses are going to make the world a really tough place to be.
My Story: From Paradise to Loss
At 32, I was married with two children, Brooke, who at the time was six, and Texas, who was four. I had a house, a car and money in the bank. I had been a TV actress for most of my life, which meant that I had some really cool experiences. In May 2017, I was in Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean Islands, really beautiful part of the world. And we had been invited there as a family by a friend of ours who had given us access to this plush apartment on a golf course. And we had just spent ten days in the glorious Caribbean sunshine. And if you had scrolled down my Instagram feed that time, you would have seen a woman and a family with a great life and a whole heap of exciting future spread out in front of them.
Fast forward two months, and my husband Ross had died. In the weeks leading up to his death, I was in a hospice bed. I could hear the nurses chatting in the corridor and that familiar sound of beeping machines that anybody who has been around sick people would recognize. It was 1AM. And I was Google searching the stages of death. Because lying next to me in a twin bed was my husband Ross. And I was struggling to get to sleep because I was listening to his breathing and wondering which breath would be the last.
Now after my Google search, I realized I probably had a few more days with him. So I used that time wisely. And I decided that I knew I couldn’t change what was happening and that trying to fight it was going to prolong the pain and suffering. So I decided to practice acceptance. Acceptance that my husband was going to die. Acceptance my life was going to change. I looked for the good around the pain. And I took back my power.
The Diagnosis and the Question of Why
Ross had been diagnosed with brain cancer in February 2014. And it was bad from the start. Grade four, rare, a PNET tumor, normally found in children, normally found at the back of the head, his was at the front. And fifty-fifty chance of surviving five years. And when we went to that first meeting with the oncologist, Doctor Spooner, a tall, empathetic man who wore odd socks, carried the most battered and bruised briefcase you’ve ever seen. And much to the horror of my husband always wrote in red biro.
On that first meeting, my husband asked, “Why do I have a children’s brain tumor? Why is it at the front of my head when it’s normally at the back?” And that kind doctor looked my husband in the eyes. He leant forward. And he said, “I don’t know why you’ve got brain cancer.”
The answer was refreshingly honest. We spend our lives searching for meaning, trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes torturing ourselves over the seeming unfairness of a situation. “Why always us,” we’ll say. “Why always the good ones?” But unfortunately, that’s just not true. It’s not just the good guys that go through troubling times. It’s all of us.
The Just World Myth
Psychologists call this the just world myth that if I am good, good things will happen to me. And we all know this isn’t true. We can do our very best and still fail. We can love with the purest love, and we can still have our hearts broken. Professor Leon F. Seltzer calls these our fines for just being alive. That it doesn’t matter how good we are, we cannot escape the inevitable truth that unfairness will still occur.
After Ross’s diagnosis and his first brain surgery, I found myself on my own for perhaps the first time since the diagnosis. And I walked into my house and I looked at it like a stranger seeing it for the first time. Pictures on the wall, the post left out on the table, everything just frozen in a time before Ross had cancer. And I sat down on the floor and I cried. Really cried. The type of crying where you think you’re never going to stop.
But in that moment, I had more clarity than I’ve ever had in my entire life. Because in that moment, I realized that nobody was going to fix this for me. And if I wanted to have a happy life regardless of all of the challenges, then it was down to me. So I picked myself up off the floor, dried my eyes, put on a ton of makeup. And I decided to do whatever it took to get me and my family through this time in our lives.
Traits of Mentally Strong People
When I speak to mentally strong people, there are commonalities in how they deal with life. They don’t feel sorry for themselves. They aren’t ashamed to cry and be vulnerable when needed. They don’t feel like the world owes them anything and they’re willing to be adaptable.
Ross dying was and is one of the most painful things in my life. And people can often find it hard to understand how I can stand here and talk so openly about my pain and my loss. They might also find it hard to understand how I can move forward or why I don’t fit the stereotype of a widow. But I believe that we are taught a very skewed idea of fairness from a young age and we simply won’t let go of it into adulthood. And while we’re focused on some injustice that we feel that we have or are going through, we are completely stuck in this pain.
And in order for us to become unstuck, there has to be a level of acceptance and responsibility that comes into play.
The Impossibility of Perfect Fairness
I mean, what if the world really was fair for everyone? If you and I, we could create this wild utopia where everybody got everything that they wanted. What would that actually look like? Maybe only the evil people would get sick. Sounds alright, doesn’t it? We’d all be beautiful, which is totally subjective, and everybody would always win, meaning none of us actually won.
This insane world of fairness is not only implausible, but the idea that it should or could ever happen is stopping us from living in our right now. And that doesn’t mean not fighting for equality and standing up to injustice, but it does mean on a very personal level that if you want to be happy, then you have to learn to accept there are some parts of your life that are just going to be unfair. And there are huge chunks of your life that you have no control over.
So let’s think about your life for a moment. You will have a thing. You will have a painful thing. What would happen if you let go of the expectation of fairness? How might you respond differently? How might that affect your emotions or your experience of the world?
Perhaps instead of feeling stuck, you would start to look for the lessons in what you’re going through and feel really truly grateful for the good bits in your life. Perhaps instead of focusing on the things you don’t want, you’d begin focusing on the things you do want. The things you can control, not the things that you cannot.
Am I grateful for my husband’s death? Absolutely not. I wish that he was here more than anything. But I can’t change the fact that he’s died. I can only change my response to this. And when we stop banging our heads against the wall and screaming about how unfair the world is, then we can truly live.
Recognize that you might not be able to control any of that external stuff, but you can damn well control the internal stuff. So when life gets tough, which it will, stop. Have your cry. Have your moment. And then get up and work out a new plan.
Option B: Finding Freedom in Plan B
Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Option B, after the sudden death of her husband, which focuses on when your plan A is taken away from you, what will be your option B? And most of us get so caught up in how our lives should look, that we can actually become quite inflexible and rigid. So when we are forced into our plan B, there can be a freedom in this.
When Ross died, I realized that I didn’t really understand the world very much because the world I knew, my plan A definitely had Ross alive in it. So when plan B was my reality, I had just had to stay open to what might come next and listen to the lessons I was being taught.
Because life really is just a series of moments, lessons and experiences. And we just have to soak up these moments of joy with the people we love while we have them. And let go of grasping onto things in order to hold onto them.
Free Yourself
Free yourself of the burden of everything playing out exactly as you think it should. Because even with the best planning and execution in the world, it probably won’t. Free yourself of the expectation of expecting fairness and a level playing field because it’s never going to happen. There is always going to be somebody looking better, better at your job, who will live a long, happy, healthy life with the person they love, money in the bank, supportive family. So what? What are you going to do about it?
Because you guys are not unlucky. It doesn’t come in threes and it’s not just you. Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself for not always getting it right. And recognize that being resilient to the tough stuff, it’s not about what you can endure. It’s about resting, recuperating and living fully in your moments in between.
