“It Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier”
You thought the ending meant release, You thought the quiet would bring peace,
An Original Song for Survivors
“It Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier”
An Original Song by Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.
Music & Lyrics Copyright © 2026 – All Rights Reserved Worldwide
LYRICS
It Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier
The number’s blocked, the money’s gone,
The lie is dead, the night moves on.
You think the worst has reached its end,
Now life should start to mend again.
But silence comes when chaos clears,
And leaves you standing with the years,
The words, the plans, the future made,
A thousand truths inside one masquerade.
You thought the ending meant release,
You thought the quiet would bring peace.
But when the noise has disappeared,
You finally feel what brought you here.
It gets harder before it gets easier,
The road gets steeper before it gets clearer.
You learn the truth, then you learn to live it,
You lose your strength, then practice gives it.
You don’t go back to who you were,
You build somebody stronger from the blur.
When every part of you says leave it here,
Keep going.
It gets harder before it gets easier.
At first there were a thousand things,
The passwords changed, the phones that ring,
The banks, reports, the evidence,
A mind surviving consequence.
Then all the urgent work is done,
And nowhere left for grief to run.
The questions wait behind the door,
“How did I stay? What was I fighting for?”
You miss a person never there,
You hate the lie and still you care.
You know the truth inside your head,
But knowledge doesn’t make attachment dead.
It gets harder before it gets easier,
The road gets steeper before it gets clearer.
You learn the truth, then you learn to live it,
You lose your strength, then practice gives it.
You don’t go back to who you were,
You build somebody stronger from the blur.
When every part of you says leave it here,
Keep going.
It gets harder before it gets easier.
Six months in and you’re tired of this,
Tired of the lessons, tired of the list,
Tired of talking, tired of pain,
Tired of walking the same road again.
“I know all this. Why am I here?
I know the tricks. I know the fear.”
But knowing fire can burn your hand
Is not the same as learning where to stand.
The brain learns slowly what you repeat,
New roads are built beneath your feet.
A boundary practiced one more time
Becomes a wall the next time danger climbs.
You do not heal because the calendar turns.
You heal because the nervous system learns.
You heal because the truth gets used,
Because the old reflex can be refused.
Because a frightened thought can come and go
Without deciding where your life will go.
And joy still matters.
The music, the garden, the friends, the sun.
But not every piece of the old life
Has to come back all at once.
You want your normal, want it now,
The old routines, the old know-how.
But trauma takes a different toll,
It rearranges life around the hole.
Some things grow smaller for a while,
Some things return, some change their style.
Some things you loved may fall away,
Not every loss is meant to be reclaimed.
The old you carried less than this,
So stop comparing what you miss.
You are not failing when you’re slow,
You are carrying weight you did not know.
It gets harder before it gets easier,
The road gets steeper before it gets clearer.
You learn the truth, then you learn to live it,
You lose your strength, then practice gives it.
You don’t go back to who you were,
You build somebody stronger from the blur.
When every part of you says leave it here,
Keep going.
It gets harder before it gets easier.
Then one day something starts to change,
The dangerous words don’t sound the same.
A sudden message does not rule
The part of you that learned the tools.
You test reality before belief,
You let uncertainty exist beneath
The urge to answer, save, or prove,
And fear no longer gets to choose.
The criminal takes less space inside,
Shame no longer gets to drive.
Trust comes back in smaller ways,
Built from ordinary, honest days.
It got harder before it got easier,
The road got steeper, then it got clearer.
You learned the truth, then learned to live it,
You lost your strength, then practice rebuilt it.
You never went back to who you were,
You became someone wiser through the hurt.
Not untouched, not unchanged, not without fear,
But standing.
And it gets easier
because you got better at being here.
It’s still hard for me at night. I must admit I miss talking to the criminal but I work through it by reading SCARS and learning. I’m not going back to that world. It crushed me. I feel different from who I used to be. I was so trusting. Now I’m cautious n I know what to look for but I still don’t risk temptation so I stay off social media. There are days I want to just give up but that’s not an alternative. This is working slowly but surely.