I can't even

I wrote this today, but then went back and forth deciding if I should share it.  I decided to just go for it because it was so therapeutic to write and I thought it might help someone else who is having a hard day know that they are not alone.  I also thought it was important for me to be really honest about the grief and sense of loss that comes with chronic illness, and that that grief is not a one step process on the path to acceptance.  It cycles back around from time to time and I find feeling it deeply is far more helpful in moving on than pushing it aside.  So this is me being vulnerable and honest, because life is hard and it has to be okay to admit that.

This has easily been the hardest summer of my entire life.  Which may explain why I haven’t written a single blog post since the end of spring.  You know the saying “I can’t even”?  Well that about sums up my mood right now.  I could make an insanely long list about the “can’ts” in my life and although I try to be positive, some days I can’t even do that.  Because today I’m angry, and so disappointed in my life.  I know that it’s probably a passing feeling but today I feel it so intensely that I can’t brush it off.  I’m so exhausted with spending every second of everyday just trying to do basic things.  And although what I have isn’t terminal it has killed off what I thought my life would be and left me with no time to do anything except think about how to control my environment so that I can survive.  But I don’t feel like I’m surviving, that girl I thought I’d get to be, she’s gone, left at the wayside because you can’t focus on your breathing and try to control your heart rate and try to stay conscious and carry around big dreams all at the same time.  It gets too heavy to carry all that so because survival instincts kick in I’ve had to drop and walk away from whole pieces of myself.  And I guess the part that kills me the most is that I never had outlandish dreams of doing big great things.  My dream was to just live.  Live a boring, happy life.  I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, I wanted to get married and have a family.  Really simple dreams that I still hope will happen but today they feel so far off, so far from where I am that they feel almost impossible.  And that’s just the thing, I’m really okay with a hard or painful life, I just want it to feel possible.  Tomorrow it probably will feel possible, because tomorrow is a new day and I can start anew, but today in this moment it all doesn’t feel possible.  Sometimes we just have to feel the feeling, even if it seems to crush us with its weight, even if it feels like the feeling takes up the whole room, even if you know the feeling may not be steeped completely in reality, even if it’s an all or nothing type of feeling, even if it feels dramatic, even if you know it will be gone tomorrow.  Sometimes we need to feel shattered so we can begin to put the pieces back together.