working inside the gap, what happens when you stop trying to make the hard thing easier
013 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
I’ve had the same tabs open all week. I tell myself its research. Some of it, I’m aware, is simply distraction. Between the excessive tabs opened and the infinite scrolls, I am writing, rewriting, and erasing, again and again. The words I’ve tried to write a handful of times over. A defiance, perhaps or a fear, to publishing what I’ve written. (I am sorry I missed you last week.) It happens. I am human.
Like my grandmother who was considered a rebel in her day, she was the woman who looked at everything she was supposed to want: the approved match, the safe path, the family’s idea of a good life, and quietly chose something else. She married the man she loved, despite every voice telling her otherwise.
Knowing it’ll be the more challenging path to take. She stepped forward, with conviction; a decision that changed her life. At the time, nobody called it courage. They called it defiance. Looking back, she was a trailblazer. Determined to follow her instinct. I know she’d say it paid off.
I think about her on days like today. Setting my own deadlines, entertaining my own doubts, arguing with myself on my own negotiations. I am nurturing the gap between what this could be and what it is right now. And sometimes, like today, I’m fidgety. I’ve learned to accept that it’s the weather system I am working inside of.
The certainty within the uncertainty. The conviction without the guarantees. It lives and breathes as part of the process of mastery. Because the imposter doesn’t get loud when things are moving. It gets loudest while the tabs are left open and untouched.
This edition is about what happens when you stop trying to make the hard thing easier? What happens when you start trusting that what’s hard is actually how and where growth happens? So, what if the gap isn’t the obstacle to building something real, but the actual condition that it requires?
Learn something that makes you feel slightly stupid. Some days, building this newsletter humbles me. Where the gap between what you’re trying to build: a voice, a community, something worth your time, and what you actually know how to do right now feels a little wide. Like a dream, within reach, but still living in that gap for what’s still to become. It’s exactly why I keep showing up each week, for you, beautiful people. And turns out, I’ve been stimulating my brain in exactly the best kind of way where learning lives. Neuroscientists call it desirable difficulty: the productive struggle that happens when the brain encounters genuinely unfamiliar material. In other words: do hard things, especially the ones you find uncomfortable. Research from the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab at UCLA shows how learning that requires serious effort produces significantly stronger long-term memory consolidation than passive reviews, like memorizing facts. The growth is in the struggle. It’s the mechanism for learning that lasts. What’s your current desirable difficulty?
Be bored. A 2019 study published in Academy of Management Discoveries found that participants who experienced boredom before a creative task generated significantly more imaginative solutions than those who spent time stimulated and prepared. Boredom activates the brain’s default mode network, the same system linked to creativity, self-reflection, and meaning-making. Not a passive system. A generative one. The problem isn’t only that we’re too busy. But that we’ve built an entire ecosystem of tools designed to eliminate the white space the moment the feeling creeps in. The scroll begins before you’ve even registered the discomfort. The podcast fills the void through walks and drives before silence has a chance to sink in. So I’ve started leaving my phone in another room, for walks, or for when I make coffee or tea in the mornings. Not as a disciplined practice, but because I want to create more room for my thoughts to roam. Minus the layered, multiplied, and constant blackhole of distractions. I am safeguarding my attention, what about you? We’re so used to reaching for the neurological equivalent of a pacifier, and avoiding the silence, while also removing the time for the mind to fully rest and recover. When was the last time you allowed yourself to indulge in boredom, without the guilt?
Lift something heavy. There is a concept in biology called hormesis: a controlled dose of stress makes the organism stronger. Not despite the stressor, but because of it. When the body faces something difficult: a toxin, a temperature change, a resistance it wasn’t expecting, it is forced to adapt. When you remove the stressor, you remove the adaptation. The comfort you keep trying to return to turns out to be the thing that’s blocking the adaptation; or the growth. This is what resistance training does at the cellular level. Muscle fibre placed under load tears microscopically, then rebuilds stronger, dense, and much more capable than before. A study published in the British Journal of Sport Medicine found that this process should be considered as a frontline approach in the management of depression and anxiety. The mechanism is what produces brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), a protein with strong correlation to memory, learning, and neuroplasticity. The stress is not a deterrent to the outcome, the stress is how the outcome is produced. Training my body has always been about trusting that the weight load is demanding something serious from me and forcing an adaptation.
Call the person you’ve been meaning to call. Not a voice note. Not a text that begins with “thinking of you,” finished with a heart emoji, as if there’s an unspoken agreement that this now is what counts as connection? A classic old school phone call is more like it! The kind where you can hear each other’s breath and anticipate the next moment, through the sighs, giggles, and pauses. It’s nourishing for the soul. A 2021 study by the University of Chicago found that people consistently underestimate how much others are interested in deeper conversation and connection. Some of my friends and I have scheduled our calls, intentionally, on our calendars. Whatever makes it work. Though straddling timezones can make coordination a logistical hurdle, we’re saying let’s do the ‘hard-ish thing,’ it matters; so, just in case, here’s a tool to help you schedule across timezones too.
Can you tell the mood I am in? ;)
No writer, thinker, thought-leader is inspiring me most than Alain de Botton. Not only am I a mega fan of The School of Life the global organization he’s built, which “offers a path to greater clam, connection, and emotional intelligence” through “psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, art and culture,” but his wisdom somehow always insights a level of reverence. Like this conversation on friendship and this book on love, which is such a vulnerable account of his own experience with love, that you can’t help but feel completely swept up by his honesty.
”…at the end of this process if you can say you had fun doing it, then no one can tell you anything of it.” — Olivia Dean. Side note: she’s my current obsession.