It has been a rough two months in my life. Very rough.
I’m still struggling with a lot of feelings and I am struggling to get myself
back, even minimally, to a point of being a self-confident, happy-go-lucky, super
thankful me. Lately, it seems like one thing goes wrong after
another. I just told a friend of mine that I feel like
I’ve been repeatedly kicked in the teeth, but I am expected to smile as if it
doesn’t hurt.
Lately, I’ve been stressing out, worrying and not
knowing what to do about situations that are not in my control. There have also
been days where I wake up and have nothing. No motivation, no desire to do anything, and when I wake up with those feelings, then all of a sudden, BOOM: self-doubt
creeps in. She creeps in with her friends self-conscious and worry. The three
of them are able to take me down in one fell swoop. One thought. One idea. And then the rest of my day is 'one of those days'.
I know that part of my problem is that I believe I
have to be strong all the time. This is something that I’ve been struggling
with for the last two months. I feel as though I have to be strong because that’s
what people always say to me. ‘You are one of the strongest women I know.’ It
saddens me that people see that in me, but fail to see that even the strongest of people
hurt from time to time. Right now, the hurt is winning and it is grief on so
many levels that cause the hurt. I miss the life we had on September 9, 2019. I
miss Billy, my grandma, the lack of self-doubt (that took
me YEARS to overcome), I miss life the way it was and I am guessing things will
NEVER go back to the way they were on September 9 and before. What I do know,
is that admitting that I’m not doing too well with our new normal, isn’t easy,
especially because my career is in working with students who are emotionally
and behaviorally challenged, many who have mental health issues as well. I work
in a mental health related field. And then here I am, being the one who is not
ok. I am not ok. I know I need to
reach out and talk through my feelings, but at the same time, in my own head,
those feelings are not valid and I’m wrong for feeling like this. It’s been a
double edged sword for me.
This school year has been especially hard for me. I
find myself struggling to embrace the students who need me the most, because I
truly am struggling to accept their lack of effort, their lack of care, their
lack of ambition. It just doesn’t seem fair to me right now. No matter how I
try to twist the facts here, to make it more acceptable to me, I can’t. Day in
and day out, I’m dealing with students who just don’t care. I used to think
that if I cared enough for both of us, their attitudes would change and they’d
see the importance of school, education. This year, I can’t bring myself to
care and I hate that about myself right now. I go to work and go through the motions and it shows.
I’ve been extremely thankful for my ‘people’, those
who have been there for me to cry to, vent to, scream at, and have just ‘been
there’. They haven’t told me things will be fine. They haven’t told me that I
need to get over it. They haven’t tried to talk me out of my feelings. They’ve
accepted how I feel, listened to WHY I feel the way I do, and are simply there
to be there. That’s what I’ve needed through all this. True friendship and
sisterhood. I know it’s ok to not be ok, and they know it too. They know that
things WILL be ok, eventually, but in my world, things are not ok right now and so
they embrace that and help me through that. They never stop believing in me,
checking in on me, and not expecting some fake answer when they ask, “How are
you today?”
Because my answer is that I’m not really ok, and that’s ok. And I guess I will
just keep reminding myself of that and being thankful for my people who will be ok with that answer because they know........
