You find out how strong you are when you’re strong for everyone else.
Can I just take a nap? I want a nap.
“Can you do it? I can’t see it”.
I took the pill bottle out of her hand, plucked the meds out and placed them into the days of the week. Then filed through the mail. Then navigated the Roku so she could watch the Food Network. Then ordered more supplements the Doctor ordered on Amazon.
By the time I finished, I sat on my computer with an empty word document in front of me. Put my fingers on the bright baby blue keyboard and dropped my head to the desk.
“Chris?!”
When I was 18 I thought I was leaving my parents and that they’d be fine. I worried more about myself because, hello, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just more experienced in not knowing what I’m doing.
I don’t want to go on with the illnesses. The hospital visits. The funerals. All of that stuff because it’s depressing today and I really just want to maintain what light I still have. I have to keep up the internal façade that I’ve got my shit together so I can actually have my shit together for the people who need me.
There’s a sense of power when you’re forced to act in situations where you would’ve normally just stood still. Because if you don’t do it, there are some scary things that could happen. So then you do it and it’s actually not as hard as you thought it was.
I both hate having to go through this stuff and also feel thankful that life has put me through it. I don’t want to see my family suffer, but at the same time, it’s given me a lot more certainty that the limits I’ve put on myself are generally up in my head.
I’m actually a lot more capable than I give myself credit for.
Life, it turns out, is like those asshole teenagers who used to literally push people as we walked into the locker room after gym class. The first time you don’t expect it so you get rammed into the wall and squeal, but by the third time you just walk around the back and go in the other way. Then you flash the jerks a smile.
I’ve had a lot of those pushes, probably far earlier in life than anyone reasonably should expect them. It’s like my own personal Series of Unfortunate Events. I read those books a lot as a kid. And now I see a completely different takeaway.
Things are always a lot better than they appear to be.
