A tweet made me google for Ash Beckhams TEDx Talk, and to verify it really was the talk I thought is was I started to listen to it. My daughter was sitting beside me, and once she started talking (Ash that is), we both nodded and said ”Yup, this is the one, what a great talk this is!”. So great, in fact, that we listen to all of it. Even though we’ve both seen it before.

The talk is about coming out of closets, and she has a refreshing take on it, Ash, seeing how we all have closets that we come out of, or try to live inside, even though closets really aren’t a good place for a person to reside in. I agree with her.

But the phrase that made me associate to this talk was another one, where she says that there is no harder, there is only hard. What she’s talking about is the fact that we often end up comparing our hardships with each other, and sometimes fall into the trap of wondering why my hardship is so much harder than someone else’s, and why that is so. And that is a trap. Because what we end up doing is compare our inside with someone else’s outside. We just have no clue.

And regardless, when I hit rock bottom, I hit rock bottom. When you hit rock bottom, you hit rock bottom. What’s the point in comparing our rock bottoms? When I’ve gone as low as I possibly can on the scale of my life experiences, I have reached rock bottom. For me. And the same goes for you. And that’s where the wisdom of Ash comes so handy. Because there is no harder rock bottom to hit, there is only really hard rock bottom to hit. And once it’s hit, it hurts. No need to compare, is there?