It's All Gone, Love, It's All Wrong

I’m tired of feeling all my feelings.

This morning was pretty rough. I just had this overwhelming sense of ennui weighing me down. Have you ever had a slightly damp blanket sitting on top of you, slowing down every single move you tried to make and also making you feel a little bit grossed out? Yeah, that was what was going on inside my head this morning.

Everything felt too hard. Everything felt like it wasn’t fun, or at least like there wasn’t any point in doing it. Part of that was the continual need to feel what I’m feeling, and to move through life not trying to just push them down. Because my big urge today was to stop doing that. I am just tired of having to keep making it, on my own, without Kellie here to help. There are absolutely plenty of others who want to help, but today it didn’t feel like anyone could do all that much to make me feel like myself.

Sometimes it has to be enough to just not try to focus on the grief and the pain and the loneliness.

This morning, I caught myself wishing that I could just have my old life back. As imperfect and messy and sometimes chaotic as it was, it was mine—ours—and I’m tired of everything being different and new and bad.

I have no shortage of things to keep me busy, but no interest in doing them.

I have no shortage of people who love me and want to be there for me (including my parents, who are literally in my house to be there for me), but no interest in engaging with anybody.

I’m writing this out of habit today, which is as good a reason as any to follow through on all kinds of things. Habits can be hard to form, so I see it as a win that I’m managing to do so, even now.

Everyone else gets to just live their lives, and I don’t have that privilege. I have to sit in meetings this morning and try my best to fake my way through. It sucks, and I’m just over it.

Sooooo this is a great example of what this is like for me at the moment. I wrote that section up there around 10:30am today, and it’s currently 8:00pm. Right now (and for the past ten hours or so) life has felt pretty okay. This evening, life has felt pretty great, even!

This is all so messy. I hate that I’m sometimes in the darkest mood possible and then I’m awesome, often in the exact same day.

But here’s the thing: this whole newsletter is an intentional exercise in being honest and vulnerable and real. So in another life, I would have deleted everything above that makes me look like I’m giving up entirely. Because I’m absolutely not giving up on anything, but at 10:30am I was pretty down in the dumps.

Hell, I think I haven’t cried in at least eight hours now, which is incredible for a rough day. I was in a meeting this morning and had literal tears dripping down my face (pretty sure nobody noticed), because someone was talking about loss and how hard it was for her when her mom died a couple years ago.

To recap: This morning was stupid. Tonight is great. Life goes on.

I’m not giving up, I promise.

Matt