I had the weirdest thought as I’m valiantly fighting this manuscript:
“I wish I could go to the grocery store and think.”
Yeah, I know “I write. I teach. I mom.” is my thing, but the Mom part is like 90% of my time. This means, like many parents, I am always multitasking. I didn’t realize the extent of it until we started staying home in March. MARCH!
I am tired—physically & mentally. I am also tired of being afraid. It’s exhausting. I’m afraid that this invisible nightmare could shatter my life, like it has done so many others, at any given second.
It’s the constant state of feeling like I’m doing all the things )yet none of the things) that gets to me. And it’s all under a wide-reaching umbrella of anxiety.
I wish I was able to release one of those infamous breaths in books that I didn’t know I was holding. (Come on, I know you’ve read a line something like that at some point in your life.) But I KNOW that I’m holding this. I don’t know if holding it is what’s keeping me together or if the release is what I need to feel lighter.
I don’t have a lesson or a tidy moral to this story. Maybe I just wanted to share a very real moment with you–just in case you’re feeling overwhelmed too. Maybe I’m tired of fighting the same manuscript I’ve been working on for months when I can usually write one in a couple of weeks and it is a fun distraction to write something completely different.
Maybe I regret not realizing that holding 90s & early 2000s nostalgia concerts behind a shopping cart in Walmart was one of my mental happy places.
But I know that this too shall pass. I have every right to a range of emotions, as we are experiencing a pandemic, after all.
I hope that after this, after life seems a little less scary and a little more predictable, that we all will savor moments of joy no matter how small. Inshallah, I know I will try my best to do so.
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