This phrase was made popular during the Gulf War and military executions in the Middle East fighting the war on terror. You can almost feel the meaning by just reading it aloud. 
Embrace. Grab your current situation, circumstance, or place in life. Own it for now. It doesn’t have to be forever. Embrace, but don’t take it to the grave with you.
Suck. I love the down and dirty feeling you get from this declaration. Words like: challenge, struggle, and adversity could easily be inserted but they don’t have the chutzpa of suck.
Every day the great nation we live in provides us with a wonderful power. We have the power to choose. You must choose to embrace the suck. This may seem counter productive to the strong-willed contingent who will think to fight it. “Fight the suck,” they’ll say. I’ll tell you why this is not the case.
I’ve learned this separates us from the reality of the situation and draws us deeper into the struggle. The sooner you own and believe in the struggle, the better. It doesn’t mean you will eventually succumb to the challenge, it means you understand where you are and that is a milestone in itself.
Simply understanding when you are in the suck will change your viewpoint on your predicament. Ben Franklin said, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.” Ben was a pretty sharp cat, but what he forgot to add was adversity.
To bring a sledge hammer of real talk to this post I’d like to tell you how I recently chose to embrace the suck. Over four and a half years ago my wife and I decided we wanted to start a family. As weeks turned to months and months to years we become jaded with the process. It’s consuming when all of your friends and family members want to know, “why don’t you have kids?”
We are two healthy young adults. In our lives, my wife and I achieve what we set out to achieve. However, no matter how hard we tried, we were faced without what we wanted most. A child. This is an extremely empty feeling, but one we had to embrace and support each other in the journey to parenthood.
I believe our support in one another and our mental conditioning made us reflect on our challenges and embrace them along with one another. It certainly wasn’t what we were asking for, but it is where we were. We chose to embrace the suck. Hopefully it wasn’t going to be forever.
ACTION ITEM: The next time you face adversity, take a moment and step back from your situation. Get outside your own thoughts and see your challenge for what it is. Use this moment to place a cat-like grin on your face and say to yourself, “I choose to embrace the suck.” You’ll feel better and you’ll attack the adversity instead of giving it unneeded fuel to burn.
