struggle – A Graceful Catastrophe

I Hate My Life

November 6, 2019 A Graceful Catastrophe

No truer truth has been spoken to me in recent months.

Seriously. I hate it. How did I get here???

I see my daughter every other week. I get the equivalent of about 4.5 more years with her before she goes off to college. And that’s being generous.

I am traveling out of the country next week and spent the day trying to figure out how to not come home.

Because I don’t want to be around family. At. All. If I can’t have my daughter, I don’t want to be around anyone’s family.

I don’t want to be around happiness.

Not during Thanksgiving.

Sure. I have plenty to be grateful for…of course!

I’d be fine seeing single people filled with gratitude. And spending my time with those single people.

But absolutely no happy families. Because I don’t have a happy family.

So, I think I’ve decided to road trip. Just so I can avoid my life a little bit longer. Because I really hate this reality.

Today has been a struggle. All day long. I woke up upset. I cried during my workouts. I cried in between them. I cried when I came home from them. Then I had to pull it together so I could work.

And thank goodness I love what I do and who I spend my time with while at work. Because they made all the difference today.

But then, I had to come home…

And I remembered that I hate my life.

I’ll be 39 next month.

This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.

At least, not personally. Professionally, things are wonderful. I’m grateful for how I get to earn a living. I’ve never been happier, professionally speaking, than I am right now.

But personally? Ugh. Disgusting.

I’m ashamed of myself.

Truly.

Well, I wrote this Monday night, after a pretty terrible day where I was all up in my head and my feels. And, to be perfectly honest, after consuming a hefty-sized margarita.

Rather than erase/edit it heavily, I’m leaving it.

Guys, I am not as strong as I seem. I have my moments. I have entire days! I cried during my morning workouts Monday morning (feel free to check out my Instagram, where I made a brutally honest post). All of these emotions are exhausting to process – still. The roller coaster isn’t as wild and extreme as it once was, and I’m ever so grateful for that! Yet, I’m still on it. It’s still quite the ride. I’ve learned, over time, that when I’m not living with complete honesty – to myself and those around me – my days are much harder.

I have much more anxiety. I binge eat, and then feel terrible (at one point, I was up almost 20 pounds from 2 months ago. I’m dropping it back down, and doing so in a healthy manner). I pick at my cuticles (my M.O. for when I’m way too stressed to handle life). I don’t sleep.

When I’m living a dishonest life, one that lacks authenticity, it really messes with me – mentally and physically.

So, that means I have honest conversations with myself. Seriously. I look at myself in the mirror and ask myself, “What the hell are you doing?!” I also don’t tiptoe around others anymore. Not around strangers and not those closest to me.

This is me. I say how I’m feeling. I can’t – and won’t – hide my tears. Even though I want to run away, I refuse to hide.

People have told me that they gain strength from these blogs and from me. Every time I’m grateful, though I’m mostly shocked. I am not that strong. I’m exhausted. I want to run away. I AM running away. And lately, I feel like I sell out a bit of my soul for tiny moments of pure happiness, that come only when it’s convenient. But, for right now at least, I’ve decided that I want to feel that happiness – at any cost.

So, the roller coaster continues. Life’s imbalances continue. My emotions vary from day to day, week to week.

And then, I remember.

Just breathe, girlie. You’ve got this.

Bring it back to this moment right now. And then inhale slowly. And let it out…let it all out.

I did the incline yesterday morning. It’s like my form of meditating. It gets my mind right almost every single time – that workout rarely fails me.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

What it does for me is so amazing. It’s transformative. And, it hit me, this journey is incredibly symbolic to life. I think that’s why I feel so wonderful every time, after I’ve completed it. It shifts my perspective. The incline is a perfect symbol of how to do life. You tackle this beast one step at a time, sometimes having to tread slowly and carefully, other times throwing caution to the wind so you can hustle to make your goal, and other times you find yourself crawling on all fours because you’re not sure how exactly you’ll make it to your next breath, much less your next step.

But you do! And then, you’re at the top, realizing it wasn’t as bad as it seems – it never is.

Sure, I mean, it’s been plenty bad. I’ve had moments in my life where I’ve felt hopeless, terrible desperation, and everything has just felt pointless. I can think back to specific times where I’ve just wanted to throw in the towel, so to speak, because the thought of doing anything else was simply too exhausting.

I have felt completely and utterly defeated.

There have been some dreadfully dramatic moments where I have cried, laying flat on the floor, face buried in my arms, until a puddle of my own tears formed beneath me.

And then, I breathe through it and another day comes. Because, really, I refuse to succumb to any other choice. For me, there is no other option other than to keep getting back up, no matter how badly I’ve gotten knocked down. Thankfully, I am surrounded by an incredibly strong and positive community, who oftentimes have done the heavy lifting and have picked me back up.

So, one way or another, I’ve always gotten back up.

And every single time, I’m able to stand a bit taller. I feel a bit stronger.

Then, I check in, reminding and reassuring myself that I am, indeed, strong. That I am “enough.” This is so new to me – to believe that I am “enough.” I want to make sure I now continue to realize that I am. Which means I must be aware so that I don’t fall into old habits.

Like I did Monday.

So, I am choosing to create these new habits. Ones where I remind myself who I am. And I keep myself honest, by self-reflecting regularly and asking myself the hard questions. Like, do my actions reflect a life being lived with authenticity? Do I tolerate nonsense because I don’t think I deserve better or is it because I’m choosing to give grace and be understanding? I’m almost constantly checking in with myself to make sure I understand my worth, that I continue to recognize my value. Then, I’m careful to not answer these self-imposed questions until I’m convinced the response I’m giving to myself is actually one I’m certain is the truth.

It takes work to battle my demons.

Yet, I’m finally realizing these demons I am fighting, the ones we all fight in whatever way they show themselves, are not signs of weaknesses. My greatest battles within – understanding my value and believing it, and giving myself grace – are what give me strength, in the long run. By continuously facing those demons head on, by writing them down publicly and not trying to hide them, by acknowledging out loud that I engage in these battles frequently, it reminds me I am human. And that I can use these broken moments to learn and grow.

I refuse to have a fixed mindset. Every single day I can become a better version of myself, if I choose to. Every time I acknowledge that my demons defeated me in certain moments, or for days, I am also acknowledging that I had the strength to face them and get back up again. I am reminded that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

And that’s my big takeaway from being so in my head this last Monday. I was questioning myself, my integrity, my authenticity, my tolerance…everything, really. And I was beating myself up, refusing to give myself the grace that I deserve, and simply making “it” all bigger and worse in my head than what the reality of this life is.

It’s not as bad as it seemed on Monday. Life is good.

I actually love my life.

I’m beyond grateful for this journey.

Everything just is. Nothing is quite as bad as it seems. Nothing is quite as good as it seems either. No matter how we’re feeling, especially when we’re feeling the extremes, it’s all just so short-lived. The only thing certain is that it all will change. Everything is quite fleeting – situations, feelings, time…

So, I remind myself, once again, to breathe through the moments, especially those where my emotions feel extreme. Nothing lasts forever, at least not without constant effort to make it persist, and that’s true with both positives and negatives. What you feed is what will grow.

So, days like this past Monday will come and go. Days so much better than this last Monday will, too.

All I can do is continue to accept the journey, and breathe through all the moments. Because that’s all life is. Moments. And if we choose our focus correctly, they’re all good.

life

Fight or Flight?

June 19, 2019June 20, 2019 A Graceful Catastrophe

You always hear kids saying how unfair life is, “it’s not fair that so and so gets a TV in their bedroom!” Or, you know, insert some material thing that some friend of theirs, or classmate, has.

As adults, life is still anything but fair.

It’s not fair to get cancer at 33 years old. It’s not fair to kick it’s butt and then struggle with crippling depression after getting the news that you’re all clear, making you, in ways, sicker than you were when you were actively fighting and going through all the treatments.

It’s not fair to grow up dreaming of motherhood, being a young adult and doing everything right to prevent a pregnancy, working incredibly hard as an adult, waiting until you’ve reached a “respectable” and “fiscally responsible” time of your life to start trying, and then finding out that you can’t have kids naturally. It’s not fair to spend 10’s of thousands of dollars and still come up empty. Causing you to feel a void greater than you ever thought was possible.

It isn’t fair to lose your dear brother, your best friend, to cancer, watching him slowly and painfully die and leave behind a family that loves him with every breath they take – and will ever take.

It isn’t fair that, when you’re doing everything your instincts are screaming for you to do, so much that you end up losing yourself in motherhood to protect the baby you almost lost, and then your husband’s response is anything but compassionate and empathetic. It’s not fair to devote 11 years to a man, when he only devoted 10. It’s not fair that now he wants to be a husband and blames me for tearing apart our family because I cannot look past all that he has done.

Life. Isn’t. Fair. You know it, too.

Insert your reason here. You know you have one. We all do.

So what do we do with that? So, okay, life can be shit. My best friend coined the phrase, “shituation.” We all have shituations.

Do we let it overtake us? Do we become bitter and jaded, holding on to the hurt and the anger caused by the shituation? Do we actively escape our own lives in whatever way we can?

Well, yeah. Maybe. For a while, at least.

And then what?

We all know it isn’t healthy to live in that space. Not for any extended period of time, at least.

So how do we get through it?

Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve done – and am doing – and who knows if it’s right or wrong or would work for anyone else other than me. Be sure to take it with a grain of salt.

I escaped my reality. I ran away, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. Any opportunity where I had no motherhood obligations, I drank myself happy. Drank until I didn’t care. Drank to forget.

I also worked out – obsessively at times. I still do. (I’ve got to counteract the drinking… *shrug*)

And I finally reached a point where I didn’t want to escape anymore. If you read my previous blog, I, at what feels like long last, got to the point where I was ready to face this beast. And I’m now doing so, in very small bits at a time.

Fight or flight. I was in denial for a good month, then flew directly to flight for the last two.

I’m ready to fight now.

Are you?

How are you going to fight your shituation? How are you going to face the utter depths of despair and begin to crawl back from them?

I’ll tell you a secret: there’s absolutely no way I could ever possibly do this alone.

I’ve learned something about myself during the last 3 months. Okay, I’ve learned A TON about myself, but here’s one thing. I don’t reach out. When life explodes in my face, I actively avoid. I thought, a few blog posts ago, that it was only those most familiar to me that I didn’t – couldn’t – be around. But it’s not. I avoid anyone and everyone.

The people I’ve opened up to are the ones who have reached out to me. They’re in my face and I literally can’t avoid them, no matter how hard I’ve tried. I’m honest – to a fault (live out loud, right?). So, if you’re someone who has reached out, and then reached out again and again, and happened to catch me in a moment that absolutely sucked, I’ve opened up to you – probably giving you more than you bargained for. I’ve done this with strangers. I’ve opened up to close friends. I’ve opened up to acquaintances. Anyone who happened to be there for me and just wouldn’t get out of my face.

The ones who have consistently checked in and would check in again and again until my silence and facade broke? Guys, find those people.

I know I haven’t been that person for so many going through their shituations. The energy necessary to consistently check in was more than I had in my tank. It troubles me greatly that I haven’t been able to be that person for all my friends going through their shit. Because I know how impactful those people have been to me. I hope my tank is starting to fill. I can’t keep running on “emotional empty.”

This shituation I’m in has been draining on so many levels. SO MANY, GUYS!!!

And I’m angry and frustrated that it has changed who I am as a friend.

It’s changed who I am as a person, guys. I am not who I was. I’ll never be her again.

I don’t know who I am. Honestly.

And that’s so hard to admit.

I’ve always had a good head on my shoulders. I’ve always been responsible and thought about how my actions would affect my future. I’ve always known exactly what I was going to do tomorrow and next week and next month and next year…and so on.

But for what? All of that for what exactly?!

There is no reality past this breath I am taking right now.

But there has to be a balance.

So how do I find it?

How do I care about how my actions today will affect my future when time and again I have been shown that my future can change in a second. A mere, tiny, oh, so very significant second!!!

Oof, I am angry.

I am on a plane right now. And I’m surrounded by couples, actively loving one another. And I just wonder, when will it end for them? What will be their demise?

Because relationships aren’t infinite.

*sigh*

So, there you go. Real time. Real emotions. This blog quickly shifted from uplifting to anger.

This anger is constantly simmering. I’m always at the edge. It doesn’t take much to trigger me anymore.

And this is just not who I am! I’m not an angry person. I never have been.

Maybe this is the new me.

Distrusting. Angry. Frustrated. Jaded. Bitter.

Do you realize how toxic those emotions are? And they’re all harboring inside of me. Silently waiting to show themselves at the first opportunity that presents itself. And I have no clue when that could strike.

Like in the middle of a crowded plane, as I furiously write this on my phone.

So here we are. Full circle.

You are reading it live…raw. The full gamut of what I live, moment by moment, every single damn day.

Future? What a joke. I can barely process an hour at a time.

But I can’t keep flying away. That’s not reality. And it surely isn’t healthy.

So, ladies and gentlemen, how do we fight?

This life is absolutely worth fighting for. I obviously have no doubt about that. This life, these moments in my life, they all serve a purpose. I believe that all the way to my soul.

From moments filled with hope to moments spiraling out of control and finding themselves settling in rage, they all teach me something.

And they are all valid.

This blog feels absolutely all over the place.

Real time.

Real emotions.

This is life.

It fluctuates for everyone. Though, perhaps, not as quickly as you’re seeing here.

I have been writing for a little over an hour, or so, now.

And this is why I’m pretty consistently emotionally drained right now. And a self-absorbed person. And probably – no, definitely – not the greatest friend.

So, I hope you can forgive me.

And I hope, whenever I reach “the other side” of this shituation, you are still there. Because I love you dearly.

I guess I’m asking for grace.

And perhaps, just maybe, I am ready to start living with it again.