Let’s start with the part nobody warns you about: hard times don’t send a calendar invite.
Sometimes they hit like a truck you never saw. The phone rings at an hour when phones should not ring. A doctor says “I’d like you to sit down.” Your boss says “do you have a minute?” and you know, in your bones, that you do not have a minute, you have a whole new life you didn’t apply for. Your kid’s school calls, and it’s not the good kind of call. A person you love is here at breakfast and gone by dinner. One sentence, and the before is over. You don’t get to take your stuff.
And then there’s the other kind. The slow kind. The kind where you watch the thing begin to fall, and you can see the whole arc of it, and you are standing right there with your arms out, and there is nothing, nothing, you can do to catch it. The marriage that’s been thinning for two years. The parent who’s a little more confused every visit. The job that’s “restructuring.” The kid who is quietly drifting somewhere you can’t follow. The diagnosis with a long runway. You’ve seen the movie. You know how it ends. You still have to sit through every minute of it, with popcorn you can’t swallow.
I honestly don’t know which is worse. The sucker punch takes your breath. The slow fall takes your sleep. One gives you shock, and shock is at least a kind of anesthesia. The other gives you anticipation, which is just anxiety wearing a trench coat and calling itself “being prepared.”
Because that’s what the anxiety does, isn’t it? It sells you a lie that if you worry hard enough, early enough, in enough detail, you’ll somehow be ready. So you rehearse. You run the scenarios at 2 a.m. You draft the eulogy, the severance negotiation, the hard conversation, the apology, the call to the lawyer. You do all of it in your head, in the dark, and then the actual thing happens and you are exactly as unprepared as you would have been if you’d slept eight hours. Worry is not a down payment. Nobody ever gave you credit for it.
Now, I’m a therapist. I want to tell you what that means, because people assume it means I have a secret stash of calm.
It means I have a front-row seat. I’ve sat across from thousands of people on the worst day they’ve ever had. The funeral that’s tomorrow. The test results that came back wrong. The pink slip. The affair. The empty bedroom of a kid who left, or was taken, or just isn’t speaking to you right now. I’ve watched grown, accomplished, brilliant people fold in half in my office because the thing happened and the thing is just too big. I’ve held that room. I’m good at holding that room.
Here is what I learned from all those rooms: nobody is above it. Not the CEO, not the pastor, not the person who has read every book, and absolutely not the therapist. I can explain the stress response to you with diagrams. I can walk you through the window of tolerance, the amygdala, the whole lovely science of why your body is doing what it’s doing. And when it’s my phone ringing, my heart still tries to exit through my throat. My hands still shake. I still say things I regret, cry in the car, eat cereal for dinner, and stare at a wall like it owes me money. Knowing the map has never once made me immune to the weather.
And I’ll say the thing that I wish someone had said to me sooner: that’s not a flaw. That’s the design.
We are emotive, reactive, wildly sensitive animals. We are built to feel, loudly, in our chests and our guts and our jaws. When something threatens the people we love or the life we built, our bodies sound the alarm, as they were designed to do. Crying is not weakness. Rage is not a character defect. Going numb is not “being dramatic.” Snapping at the person you love most because you have nowhere else to put it is not a moral failure, though yes, you’ll probably owe someone an apology, and that’s okay too. This is what a nervous system does when the ground moves. The reaction isn’t the problem. It’s the proof that you’re a person who cares.
And can we please retire a few phrases while we’re here? “Everything happens for a reason.” “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” “At least he lived a long life.” “At least you caught it early.” “Stay positive.” I understand that people say these things because they love you and they are scared and silence is unbearable. But if one more person hands you a platitude, you are fully permitted to hand it right back. Preferably with a casserole dish still attached.
Here’s the one I’m stuck in right now, and I’m telling you because I suspect you’ve been there too. Karma. I believe in it. I do. I believe what we put out comes back around. But somewhere in the middle of a hard stretch, a tiny accountant moves into your head and starts auditing the books. What did I do? Where was I greedy? Which good thing am I paying back for? As if joy were a payday loan and every disaster the collections call. And I keep having to drag myself back to this: good things are not borrowed against bad things, and bad things are not the invoice for good ones. Sometimes you get a gorgeous, unearned Tuesday. Sometimes you get a shitty one, with no reason and no bill attached. There is no ledger. I haven’t fully made peace with that. I’m telling you anyway.
Because the truth is, sometimes it’s just random, and cruel, and unfair, and the only honest response is “yeah. This sucks.” I don’t need you to find the silver lining. I need you to be allowed to say the sky is on fire without anyone rushing to tell you it’s actually a lovely sunset.
You’re allowed to be furious. You’re allowed to be terrified. You’re allowed to be grieving a thing that hasn’t even finished happening yet. You’re allowed to laugh at the worst possible moment, and to feel guilty about it, and to laugh again anyway. You’re allowed to be a complete wreck on the kitchen floor at 11 p.m. and also the person who has to find a clean pair of socks and a permission slip by 7 a.m. Both are true. You are not a hypocrite. You are a human being carrying more than one thing at once, which is the whole job.
I’m not going to tell you it gets easier. Some of it does, some of it doesn’t, and some of it just gets quieter and learns to ride along in the passenger seat. I’m not going to hand you a five-step plan, because you have enough homework. I’m not going to tell you what it means, because I don’t know. Nobody does, and the ones who say they do are selling something.
What I do know is this. Right now, in kitchens and hospital hallways and parked cars and bathrooms with the fan running so no one hears, there are a whole lot of us. Holding our phones. Holding our breath. Holding it together with duct tape and caffeine and sheer stubbornness. Some of us are in the sudden part. Some of us are in the slow part. Most of us are in both.
You’re not behind. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re not the only one on that floor.
We’re all down here.
With love, side-eye, and no tidy answers,
Erin
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