Being at Peace When You're not Where You Want to Be
I spent the first months of the year feeling completely sorry for myself. I moved in with my parents, had foot surgery, was unemployed, and felt eons away from a life I wanted to live. I let my sadness simmer and stew until it became something rotten, losing a sense of myself as my regular routines and outlets dwindled. Frankly, I became devoted to being disappointed and ruminating on my unchanging problems. Then, something happened and everything changed: I got bored.
It started with my friends. We’d catch up, they’d ask me how I was, and I suddenly wanted to tell them anything but the truth, because the truth was that I was bad, they already knew all the reasons why, and there was nothing different about my circumstances or attitude. To be clear, I never felt like I couldn't speak about my feelings, I just simply didn’t want to anymore. I briefly projected that they would be tired of hearing the same things, but the reality was just that I was tired of feeling them. I had exhausted the airwaves and finally concluded that I couldn’t complain my problems away. To top it all off, I was dealing with the very real fear of being insufferable.
The winning combination was looking inward just enough to see that my strategy was wrong and looking outward enough to put everything into perspective. On the inside, I was stuck in this chamber of sorrow and self-pity, which was exhausting and beginning to cement to fact. On the outside, the truth was that I am just a random person who is dealing with a difficult time, and the reason I am having such a horrible reaction to it is the fact that it is completely temporary. I will not be unemployed forever, I will not live with my parents forever, hopefully my feet will not be in chronic pain forever, though the jury is still out on that one. Basically, this part just sucks and there’s almost nothing to do about it. Something about it being out of the ordinary and temporary made it feel more like a taunt, like the sunshine is just outside the window but inside the lights are off.
I finally did what everyone had been telling me I needed to do when this all started: just accept what it is and that it’s not forever. I realized that the days felt a bit better when I wasn’t putting so much effort into wishing they were different. I tried to have new things to talk about, not as a way of swallowing my misery but to distract myself from it. I had to remind myself that there were still normal things to do to get through a day – find something to be interested in, go somewhere, talk to someone. It’s true with most things, once you admit the problem or the feeling, it gets a lot easier to deal with. My frustration had grown to be an obscure monster, and once I submitted myself to it, it shrunk down to size and just became like a weird but more ignorable dust bunny.
I started going to the library in my parents’ town a lot. I was desperate for some agency, some spatial way of separating my life from theirs. It felt silly to essentially make up places to go and things to do, but I was tethering myself to some sense of obligation so I didn’t wither away into hopelessness and purposelessness. There is always a group of old blonde women playing cards in the middle of the day, always a child getting tutored and reminding me that, at the very least, I do not have to worry about a math test.
Maybe there was something about the false sense of control that I enjoyed about being so miserable. If I couldn’t control my circumstances, I could at least control how I reacted to them, which was to relish in their inconvenience and being so completely unideal. As it turns out, it was actually a lot of work to keep up my frustration and to commit to this idea that, for as long as I was living in chronic pain and in a place I didn’t enjoy, nothing would be good and there was nothing to be thankful for. In retrospect, this is a completely insular and immature way of handling hardship. I believe that if you don’t enjoy your life, you should change it; I short-circuited when I had to face the fact that I was not enjoying my life and there was nothing I could do to change it, at least not immediately. Eventually, it all just became so exhausting, and I realized that, in an effort to be as miserable as possible, I was depriving myself of any joy that was coming my way. Like with all things, at some point you have to hang up your hat and give it a rest.