When Everything Sucks: Notes from the Trenches

Hello Beautiful Human.

Okay. On this day after the midterm elections, my straw poll on Facebook shows that a whole lot of your fellow humans are feeling disappointed, depressed, exhausted, like you want to puke, considering relocation, and more than a little ragey right now. (For those of you not in Oklahoma, here’s proof that we are more complex than the media would have you believe.)

I’m not about to tell you to look on the bright side, or “there’s always 2024” or to put down your bong and go for a refreshing walk.

I am here to tell you that I feel you. I also feel compelled to share a little about what I’ve learned so far on my bumpy-ass journey towards resiliency, emotional health, and building an awesome nonprofit that elevates belonging and collaboration in the middle of a state constantly ridiculed by late night television.

TLDR: it’s hard and it can really suck sometimes…and magic is the child of suck.

When I say I understand what it feels like to be knocked down, you can trust that I do. I am a survivor of decades of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. (It’s not the suffering Olympics here - just giving you my bona fides.)

Regardless of whether you have Big T or little t trauma, you’ve been knocked down a lot lately. Everyone in America has (some more than others).

I know that if you get knocked down enough times, you start to believe that’s what the world is, and that happiness and magic is for people with more ______ than you. You’re broken, so that’s why God made netflix, box wine, selfie filters, indiscriminate exclamation points, toxic partners, and depression. (!)

And self-discovery? Pfff. Give me a break. Nobody wants to do THAT right now. Discovering that you’re an egotistical, self-absorbed asshole, for example, is the WORST. It makes you want to sit in a corner and hate yourself, and you do that already, so can’t we just go back to blaming our past and other people for the problems in our lives like the good old days?

(Rant) I mean. We’ve been through ENOUGH, haven’t we? Don’t we deserve a win? Don’t we deserve someone to swoop in to save us with a professional organizer and a trust fund? Doesn’t that douchebag and everyone who likes him deserve to have their cars keyed before they get evaporated by karma? Can’t someone just deliver a bag of money and a ban on leaf blowers and a damn humanity manual with pictures to stop the infernal rattling going on in our heads? Raaaaaaah. And now the box of wine is empty and Amazon wants money for the last season of Better Call Saul and climate change is scary and everything is stupid.

And then it’s trash day, and then it’s February, and then you wake up and it’s a few years later, and your candidate didn’t win AGAIN, and that cycle of self hatred is what your life has become. So you of course begin the whole “I suck and everything is awful” cycle again.

Meanwhile, if you’re driven towards perfectionism, like I am, you’ll put up what you think is an awesome front. “I’m FINE!,” you chirp too loudly, with a megawatt smile and a very expensive sweater that fools no one. (They can’t pinpoint what’s going on, so they’ll be really nice but they’re not going to want to hang out with you.)

Then one day you hit a point where you say, “well shit. This is it. And apparently I have choices.”

So then you make the choice to buy another box of wine and avoid those thoughts of self-agency because they feel exhausting and wayyyyy too scary.

(She stops and thinks to herself, right now, “oh hell. I think I’ve gotten off track. People are going to know I’m bonkers. I should probably spend all night editing this into something that resembles svelte thought-leadership for my LinkedIn profile.”)

But okay. Whatever. I’ve challenged myself to get this out there to you, dear human, because you’re hurting and angry and sad and lost and exhausted and stabby, and I do care deeply for you, and I want you to feel seen. You’re part of me, as surely as the wind and the crickets and the douchebags and the workers who made their cars and the keys I want to use to scratch them.

And that’s the crux of journey, really, towards resiliency and bouncing back after a lot of hardship. It’s a journey filled with disappointments and loss and pain and a lot of people who you fantasize about doing harm to. But that’s just the scenery - it’s not the journey itself.

(Spoiler alert: there is never an arrival.. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something).

Resiliency is cracking your heart open, over and over again, subjecting yourself to complete annihilation, and learning to love the fire and the bits that didn’t burn, and doing it again. This is the journey..

The trick is that we can’t do this alone. We actually need other humans to thrive. What’s kept me from going over the edge (iz not box wine sorry) is gathering up the courage to reach out to the people who forgive my absurd billboard moments and love me anyway. I have to dare to be vulnerable, dare to say, “hi. I’m in a shitstorm of [shame] [fear] [sadness] [confusion] [impostor syndrome] [stabby feelings] right now and I don’t know how to get out of it. Do you have the space to listen?” And they do. And I finally can cry and feel that blessed moment of snot-ridden catharsis, and I believe in possibility again. That act invites my friends to do the same, and when they do, I feel really really honored, and I feel great love, and I feel connected to something larger than my own demons. 10/10 worth the snot and the fear.

So. Yes. Anyway. I know the hits are going to keep coming. (Different hits than what I had before, but hits just the same.) I have also learned the hard way that defining my life as a series of traumas doesn’t get me anything but a shiny victim badge, and trust me you really don’t want to go waving that thing around because there are real monsters out there.

So. This is what it’s like right now. It’s making a choice, one moment to the next, to see beauty and potential, especially when I’m at my most sardonic and disregulated. It’s making a choice, one moment to the next, to have agency in my own life. Success isn’t the point - as my brother Angel reminded me yesterday - success is having the courage to try.

So, I keep trying. I surround myself with people who are also dog-eared warriors of the spirit, because the magic they generate is hard won, and it is much more rich, much more true, than the shiny, empty promises that turn a profit. (If you’ve ever been moved by the honest, howling laughter of a friend who has been spiritually spit out of a tailpipe, you know what I mean.)

You are going to suffer, is the point. Suffering is part of the gig. HOW you choose to suffer is on you. (You won’t ever get it right, so you might as well have fun with it.)

If you can take a moment to release your death grip on control, I urge you to see this moment of disappointment and defeat as a sacred opportunity to learn more about the extraordinary bit of stardust that lives inside you. Instead of numbing yourself, keying someone else’s car, indulging in avoidance, or madly finding proof that you’re totally right in your outrage, you can give yourself the quiet, small gift of leaning into the darkness with curiosity, and, if you hold your breath, you can (very quickly because it’s scary) turn towards what you’re actually, truly afraid of, and what you are deeply sad about. (You don’t have to FIX it, Earl.) Acknowledging your pain, fear and sadness takes the teeth out of it and makes it yours, not the vague sense of existential dread that keeps capitalism rolling. Bonus points if you reach out to someone who has earned your trust to share what you’ve discovered.

Finally, another thing I’ve learned, salient at this moment: someone who is deeply pissed off at your political party is also reading this, and they will also react with a “hunh.” Chew on that one for a hot minute before the algorithms bombard you with opportunities to settle back into your camp and buy things to assuage your pain.

We are all exhausted, afraid, and coping in the ways we know how, and the media is profiting from this by pumping us full of reasons to hate other people. Owning your pain, sharing it, and acknowledging that everyone is going through some SERIOUS shit right now is a step in the right direction. Maybe if enough people do that work, we can eventually have leaders who are driven by compassion and equity. Couldn’t hurt to try, right?

Oh. Right. And give yourself permission to fucking shine through the pain. We have enough empty advertising…the world needs your dog-eared, messed-up, not-fixed-yet, beautiful spark.

In solidarity, Big Fat Stupid Love, and abandoning my dream of ever writing greeting cards,
Nicole

P.S. So many of you are suffering in very real ways that I cannot see from here. So many of you feel fear and soul exhaustion after carrying your hopes for so long, only to see them disappear. I wish I had words for you that would give you comfort as well. I do have gratitude - thank you for being here, thank you for still breathing, thank you for protecting and carrying that hope for as long as you have. And, of course, I do have love. Here’s a little of it just for you. { }