Harder not impossible

The first time I heard the words, I was seven years old, sitting on the faded linoleum of Big Mama’s kitchen in South Dallas. It was July 2005, the kind of oppressive Texas heat that makes your clothes stick to your skin the second you step outside. The window unit air conditioner was humming a loud, losing battle against the humidity while K104 played quietly on the countertop radio.

Big Mama was sitting in her vinyl-backed chair, methodically shelling purple hull peas into a dented metal colander. Every drop made a sharp ping sound, like a small gavel hitting a desk.

I was crying hard, throwing a full-blown, seven-year-old tantrum over something completely inconsequential. A broken toy or a friend who wouldn’t share, it was the kind of minor tragedy you think is the end of the world when you haven't lived yet. Big Mama didn't shush me. She didn't offer a tissue or a cheap piece of candy to make me hush. She just let me empty my tank until I was sitting there, hiccuping and entirely out of air.

She set the colander down between her feet, wiped her thumbs, which were stained dark green from the pea hulls, on her apron, and looked at me over the gold rims of her drugstore reading glasses.

"Baby," she said, her voice completely level. There was no pity in it, just facts. "Life is going to be harder for you than for most people. Not impossible. Harder."

I stopped crying immediately. I did not have some grand, poetic epiphany. I stopped because the absolute certainty in her voice caught me off guard. In our house, Big Mama didn't lie, and she didn't exaggerate to make people feel better. Her words did not sound like bad news, and they certainly weren't an invitation to complain. It sounded like a scouting report. She was handing me the layout of the field.

Those three words, harder, not impossible, became the foundational scaffolding of my entire life. They were the frame I would one day hang everything else on. My education. My career. My grief. My love. Every ceiling I ever hit, every door that closed, and every time I got the side-eye in a room that didn't expect me, I would come back to those three words.

Harder, not impossible.

I think it is important you understand something about me before you read the rest of this book. I am not a victim, and I refuse to write like one. I have had things taken from me that I will never get back. I have sat in rooms where I was the only one who looked like me, and I could feel the weight of it. I have walked into environments where nobody thought like me, and I learned to trust my own thinking anyway. I have lost the love of my life and had to learn how to breathe on my own again. I have carried all of it and I am still standing. I am not here in spite of it, but partly because of it.

This is not a book about how unfair everything is. There are enough of those volumes on the shelves, and they leave you feeling empty, bitter, and stuck. This is a book about what you do with the hand you are dealt. It is about how you take a world that wasn't built for you and figure out how to win in it anyway. It is about how "harder" is real, and "impossible" is mostly just a decision you make.

So put down whatever story you have been telling yourself about what you cannot do. Just for a chapter or two. I am going to tell you how a girl from Dallas, with a lot against her and one phrase in her corner, decided that "impossible" wasn't a word she would let live in her thoughts.

Big Mama was born in the 1940s, in a Dallas that still told her exactly how far a woman like her was allowed to go. She grew up under segregation, went to the underfunded schools they gave her, and worked the jobs they let her have. She spent her life on her feet in other people's kitchens, cleaning houses for families who were never taught to see her as their equal.

And what did she do with all that? She did not complain. She would look at the situation and say, "This is what we have got. So let's get to work."

If a woman who survived Jim Crow and worked that hard to give her children more could meet her life with that much grace, then I have no business sitting in mine feeling sorry for myself. Her struggle was harder than mine will ever be, and she never let it become her story. The absolute least I can do for her memory is make mine a story of getting back up.

The world is going to give you a thousand reasons to quit. I am going to give you one reason not to: because quitting is the only way to actually lose the game. Everything else is just taking a longer road to the same finish line.

So this is where we start. I am not standing at some finish line declaring a flawless victory. Life is a climb, and I have made real distance, so I have learned to celebrate the wins along the way without pretending I am finished. This book starts where it all began, with the woman who taught me that hard and impossible are two very different words.

Harder, not impossible.

That is the whole book, right there. The rest is just evidence.