Today Was A Hard Day

Today was a hard day.

There’s no romanticizing this experience.

Despite the fact that I was brave and strong and courageous and resilient….

At the end of the day, it just feels like I am left with a pile of sand running through my fingers.

All of that strength….so I can do it all over again tomorrow.

It never ends.

The monotony of boredom, anxiety, depression, loneliness, sadness, and self-critique.

I feel lost. I feel discouraged. I feel overwhelmed. And I feel underwhelmed.

Life in my mid-30s, it all has come to this.

Despite all of my growth and progress and adventure and love….

It has led me to a place I am deeply unhappy in.

5 Days out of Week of my Life are consumed by a job I have a deep dissatisfaction with, and which causes me to become increasingly exhausted.

This is my life….I keep telling myself.

What happened to being a writer or a blogger or an adventurer? What happened to my light?

I am grateful, for so many others have it much worse.

Like the lady I spoke with on the phone today at work.

Her words frail with a slight whimper with every few words.

She was defeated. Exhausted. Confused. Angry.

When she told me “My husband told me he thinks he is dying and I don’t know what to do”.

What can I tell someone in that situation?

I was consumed by my own anxiety, and the increasing feeling that I am being selfish because my anxiety has taken precedence over this woman’s genuine plight.

She told me everything, about how her husband’s kidney failure had gotten worse. How they are tired of waiting for a kidney that may never come. How his overall health has increasingly taken a turn for the worse, with hospitalizations and infections taking over their lives and their bills.

I could hear the frustration, the utter desperation.

And I didn’t know what to say other than to acknowledge her feelings.

I was overcome by my own feelings. It’s always hard for me to focus on others when I have crippling anxiety. It has always made me feel like a bad nurse. Like I an uncaring, inconsiderate, unemphatic.

I am so sorry her and her husband are going through that. I could not imagine.

Like today, life is hard.

My grandmother died this past year. I watched her die.

All of my life, I feel like it has been leading up to something, but I saw when she passed.

I saw the pain. I saw the agony. I saw the horrible choking and sputtering sounds of someone hanging onto their last breath.

What is it all for? Is that the fate of us all?

All of the love and accomplishments in the end, turn to dust.

As I age, my perspective about life has shifted.

This has been the year of disillusionment. 2020 was for all of us.

There is no longer the youthful vitality where I freely carried around an attitude that there is all the time in the world and it can wait till tomorrow.

Time is running out. I feel it more than ever now.

Which is why I am increasingly concerned that I am wasting it.

Shelled away in a lonely, stressful office. Killing away my creative intention, my vigor for life, adventure, my curiosity and wonder.

Life seems to have killed my spirit. At least some days, like today.

But if there is one thing I know, it is that I have always experienced hard times, and I have always seen it through.

I know my strength, and my power.

I am a survivor.

And maybe the fact that I am still here and can write these words now means that my spirit is never truly dead.

There is something in here, in me, that is beautiful.

I am the keeper of the light.

And I will continue to let it shine, amidst the chaos of this storm.

I know I will see the sun again.

And I can look at it from a new angle then, through the pain of my trials and my scars

Until then I will take to heart these words…

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words; wait and hope”.