It’s been a long year.
Starting with the new political regime, everything has felt coarser. Harder. Less stable.
Just this fall, we had four different household issues at the same time, each of which should have taken a single visit to resolve. Instead, the vendors had to come back three or four times to get these things taken care of. Sometimes because it was hard to diagnose the problem, and sometimes out of sheer incompetence.
And it’s a pattern that repeats in our lives, over and over again. We spend precious time and mental energy tracking all of these things, making phone calls, advocating for ourselves so we don’t get taken advantage of. It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting to have to return to the same issues, again and again.
Now we’re in a new roundabout with one of our health care providers, who made the same mistake twice. How do you trust them not to make it again?
Multiple times over the last two years, organizations have made promises to me as an author that they have subsequently backed out of, smashing the hope those very offers had engendered. And during my job hunt, I was led to believe I had a great shot at position after position where I knew the person hiring, or had a fantastic interview, and every last one rejected me.
This all goes hand in hand with something else I’ve noticed for years. Corporations shift their workload onto us, making tasks more difficult and costing us time. People around us put the onus on us to follow up with them, instead of just doing what they promised in the first place.
And with each of these events, more responsibility piles upon our shoulders with little or no gain to us, and more of our hopes and feelings of safety and stability are eroded.
* deep breath *
I remember a time when things used to get better and better. When our lives improved at a steady pace. When we weren’t scared all the time that someone might come after us, that our savings might crumble away into nothing, that we might never have stability again. All of that vanished ten years ago, and we’ve never gotten it back.
* deeper breath *
And yet…
There are still sources of great beauty and moments of grace in our lives. We have amazing friends who lift us up, who check in with us and do kind things for us, and for a little while, in their presence, it’s like it’s 2014 again.
We are a long way from being destitute, and we (mostly) have our health – I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last week, but it’s the “very low risk” kind that may not ever require intervention. So that’s a blessing, even if a rather freighted one.
And we have each other. Every morning, Mark and I sit down together and take stock, and work our way through our doubts and fears. Sharing the burden makes it a little lighter for each of us.
I still hope that things can get better. That some goodness remains in human nature, despite all the evidence around me. That the small things we do for one another are making a greater change in the world around us than we can see.
That one good deed really does inspire another.
And so we close our eyes, and breathe in deeply, and breathe out hope into the world. We remind ourselves that we have been blessed in so many ways, large and small. And we hold on to the knowledge that we will get through these trying times. That we will cross this shaky bridge to find solid ground on the other side once more.
And I thank every one of you out there who listens. Who really sees me. And who understands.