What “Should Be” and What Is
This post brought to you by executive dysfunction and anxiety
My sister thinks it should be easy
to take my car out once a week.
I wish things that should be easy were easy.
I wish they didn’t feel like a weight,
a constant ticking in the back of my mind,
a burden and a shame, a failure.
Me. I’m the failure.
I have failed to be normal.
I have failed to find an easy thing easy.
I have found this light thing
to be something heavy.
It feels like a wall that I have to climb over
again and again and again.
It feels like before I was told to climb that wall
I had already hauled myself over a dozen others.
My arms noodles.
My legs jelly.
Spent.
I want to sit at the base of it and cry.
I want to lie in bed for a week or ten
instead of crawling over walls all day every day.
It’s always something
It’s always something
It’s always something
and I am so very tired.
It feels incredibly self-indulgent to even feel these things, let alone write about them, in a time when headlines and social media feeds are flooded with news of the most dire sort. How can I possibly worry about my tiny, highly privileged life?
And yet this life is the one I'm living, the one I'm in every day. This aching body is mine. This scattered brain is mine. This trauma is mine. This responsibility to follow the calls of my heart is mine. My community and the ones I love are mine, in their own way. Mine to support how I can. Mine to offer what I can, however meager it might be.
July has been, as it so often is, a series of ups and downs. Sunsets and tragedies. Anxiety and delight. A deep sense of somehow we will weather this, followed by this will all end. Hope feels like a kite string slipping out of my hand, the mad dash followed by sheer relief when I catch it before it's gone forever.
I don't have some neat ending to this, some grand moral. I guess I'm just reaching out across space asking, "Does this make sense? Do any of you feel this too?" That human need to feel Not Alone in something, to hope that somewhere your words will land with someone else who will feel the sigh of relief that is: I'm not the only one.
It’s funny how each of us has different struggles that feel invisible to everyone else. Often we are afraid to appear weak or incapable or needy, for fear others will turn away. Maybe we have experienced enough rejection that we know they will turn away either way. So we stay silent, or in your case you are courageously putting a little of your struggle in words that other can understand and going even further to share them with the world. Thank you for doing that. You are not alone. While my struggles aren’t exactly the same, I also mother children with varying struggles, and every day fight to understand them and not judge. What one of us finds manageable, another finds it to be beyond reach. Much love to you, friend.
As you say: “That human need to feel Not Alone in something, to hope that somewhere your words will land with someone else who will feel the sigh of relief that is: I'm not the only one.”
Beautifully stated- that ache.
Feeling this very strongly today, after needing to find extra “spoons” for a project with a deadline that has been put off. But in the midst of trying to manage one thing, everything else crumbles because there are never enough hands, only too many balls to dropped.
Thank you for sharing this. A reminder that so many of us feel this type of struggle and rarely manage to actually resolve it to expectation. Some days our best is crying in bed, maybe being fed. Some days, we surprise ourselves at our ability to function normally.