Have you been dealing with your own personal flurry of mild and midlevel crises? Things of which you're reluctant to go around playing your own sad violin -- lest you be accused of always murmuring about molehills when so many others seem to be dealing with adult-size mountains -- but which have you mentally and physically exhausted because they have all have piled themselves on top of you at once?
Chances are, you are among the masses who denounced the entire year 2016 as the Year of Suckiness. You may be one of those who has discovered, to your dismay, that your 2017 seems to want to follow the footsteps of your 2016.
Seems like every week since mid-2016, my husband and I have been dealing with setbacks and mishaps: the sudden disappearance of various things we depended on. Items misplaced in our small, overstuffed apartment and never turning up. Things coming up stolen (well, our license plate anyway. Sheesh.) Lingering aches, pains and sinus infections. Financial chickens that came home to roost. A recent discovery that we hadn't quite done our due diligence in a certain matter, and our dread of what appears to be a number of less-than-affordable steps we must take to make the matter right.
These may qualify as First-World problems, but can be tough to deal with when they all insist on whacking you upside the head in quick succession. "Please, can I get some time to get Problem 1 taken care of before Problem 2, 3, and 4 show up?" you want to scream.
"It's not just you," a sympathetic friend told me several times when I gave in to my frustration and vented to her verbally or via text. "Everybody is going through."
You realize that these days, indeed, "everybody" is going through ... even some who look like they're living the Life of Riley. So, again, you don't want to complain, especially knowing there are plenty who are "going through" much worse. So you count your blessings again, let out a deep breath and soldier on. But then another problem arises. And you start to feel like that bug that keeps trying to come back and cling to life after you've sprayed just about your whole can of insect killer on it.
What to do? Really? I remind myself that although he may not see fit to remove the problems at that time, the good Lord is around to listen to my vents and temper tantrums, pick me up, dust me off and maneuver me through.
Australian author Kelly Exeter blogged on the subject of problem pile-ons. In her article, "What To Do When Life Keeps Giving You Lemons," she notes that "sometimes, life throws lemons at you so hard they splatter when they hit," she writes. "So what do you do when you look back over many months and realize you've been in 'survival mode' for some time?"
She tells of the things that helped her: Ditching as many commitments as possible, doing some honest venting to trusted friends; doing "your thing" -- the stuff that makes you feel happiest; doing for others; getting outside and getting some sunshine (what sunshine we can get, with our abundance of gray days in recent weeks).
"Keep putting that one foot in front of the other and know life will get better," she promises.
Chris Gardner, the Pursuit of Happyness book/movie subject and once the object of some pretty daunting suckiness, speaks in an online interview about taking baby steps to dig out from under. "Baby steps count, too, as long as you're going forward," he says, quoting his friend, the Rev. Cecil Williams of San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church. "And one day you add all of those baby steps up and you might be surprised at what you can get to."
All stuff you've heard before, right? But just because it's cliched doesn't make it useless.
Make the decision that you'll keep stepping. Keep breathing. Vent. Hold your head up. Tackle the challenges one at a time, even if it does all hit at once. Watch, listen to or do whatever silly (but legal and moral) thing it takes to put a smile on your face. Don't let the suckiness win. Don't stop believing it will get better. I'll do it if you do it with me.
At some point, we'll go around playing not sad violin music but straight-up Marriage of Figaro overture stuff.
Forget your troubles, come on, get happy -- email:
hwilliams@arkansasonlinecom
Style on 02/19/2017