It’s not that bad

A mantra to mind in terrible times (and a chart which explains why)

I’m drafting this via voice text while walking down the trail Monday afternoon before the sun sets. While I’d like to be one of those people with such unbridled joi de vivre that creekside twilight compels me alone, I am unfortunately incentivized by both my fear of cardiac contributions to mortality (See EMT Training) and the biological needs of the dog.

Stolid as she is, the four o’clock hour is go time in these parts.

So far this week six different friends have told me how hard things are and also, that it’s not that bad.

Did I mention it’s Monday?

To be transparent, this post is about the small day-to-day neighborly cosmos, not the larger society(?) in which we either participate or comply.

Some fellows are facing surgery or other bodily expressions of complexity. More are tenderly clinging to mental and emotional quicksand, while others are on the rotten end of parasitic relationships.

One has had the entirely new mystery of having two neighbors die suddenly, both enshrowded in crime scene tape.

We text in the night, behind the safety of the dnd wall that allows us salvation from facial expression and allows us to draft and erase, draft and erase the first and second knee-jerk responses that are often unbecoming and corrosive. Third and fourth drafts are always better, because they have the benefit of a few hours of sleep or additional brain sugar, or potentially an opportunity to be counseled by committee or spell check prior to sending.

While I often wear the linguistic style of advice columnist, I assure you I have precious little to offer in these, but do manage to wrangle texts of solidarity and the small truths I hold dear.

Some things are hard.

Some things are impossible.

We ought endure neither alone.

In the Absolutely most terrible time in my life, when I had not slept well in four months and provided full-time care and nourishment for a person formally twice my size, during a global respiratory pandemic, a friend suggested that my person might apply for my person to receive meals.

As a person who wants to have a really difficult relationship with eating correctly, I had invested years of practice and therapy learning how to eat like a regular old person again.

One of the ways that I did was by deciding that I could not have rules about food, because when I was trying to get pregnant, everyone gave me rules, none of which worked.

So there I was keeping my person alive counting every sacred 10 calories of lemonade, preparing a pancreas, friendly diet, at the very tender end of my rope.

When my friend called and suggested we ask for meals to be prepared on his behalf, to relieve a third of my burden of meal preparation Olympics, I replied, with the worlds most dangerous mantra

It’s not that bad

Which is hilarious now in context. In the years that followed, I read a book about sleep, which reminded me again that the people who are least capable of assessing sleep adequacy are people who are sleeping inadequately.

The same I fear may be true of people who are going through it.

Which, if you’re reading this from the surface of the Earth, is you.

Below, I have created my very own graphical representation of why your specific life is hard, and why you cannot keep up.

You ready?