The Day I Wrote This Instead of Pretending I Was Fine

Dear diary.

Today I am defeated.

Not the dramatic kind of defeated. Not the kind that makes for a good story later. Just the quiet, grinding, bone-tired kind that comes from doing everything right, or at least trying to, and still finding yourself in the same place you’ve always been.

Financially.

Always financially.

—

I have spent the better part of thirty years in some version of this cycle.

Catching up. Getting ahead, barely, just barely, and then something happens. A repair. A bill. A season of no work. A body that decides to stop cooperating and costs $460 a month just to function like a human being. And suddenly the small ground we gained disappears and we are back to the beginning again.

Starting over.

Again.

I watch other people, and I know, I know we only see their highlight reel, but I watch them, and I genuinely cannot locate the seam. The place where the struggle shows. They seem to move through life with a kind of ease I have never once felt. Not for a sustained period of time anyway.

There was one moment. One window of years where things were actually okay. And then the housing market crashed and took most of it with it and I have spent the fifteen years since trying to claw our way back out.

Fifteen years.

I am so tired.

—

I think about the roads I didn’t take.

What if I had kept the retail location I was building toward? What if I had gone back to work when the kids were small instead of staying home? What if I had been a working mom? Would the finances look different now? Would I look different now?

I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And I’m not sure if thinking about it helps or just adds another layer of weight to something that is already very heavy.

—

Here is what nobody tells you about financial struggle that goes on long enough-

It doesn’t just affect your bank account.

It affects your joy.

It shrinks the world down to a series of calculations you never stop making. Can I get my hair done this month, the hair that is falling out for reasons nobody has fully explained and that costs $100 to address, or do I pay something else instead? Can I buy the small thing that gives me thirty minutes of peace? A Lego set, a sticker book, something small and ridiculous and completely mine, or is that irresponsible? Should I feel guilty for wanting anything that isn’t strictly necessary?

The answer is always the same.

Wait. Not yet. Maybe next month.

Next month never comes the way you hope it will.

—

And then there is the anger.

At the world. At the circumstances. At my own choices. At a body that requires expensive maintenance just to keep up with the demands of being a woman in midlife. At the relentlessness of it, the never-ending, never-quite-catching-up, always-one-unexpected-expense-away-from-starting-over relentlessness of it.

I am angry today.

I am allowed to say that here.

—

I also have a driving anxiety that came from nowhere several years ago and refuses to leave.

I cannot explain it. I can be alone anywhere, in my house, in a store, in a room full of strangers. But put me behind the wheel of a car alone and something in me panics in a way I cannot reason my way out of. It has cost me. In ways I am still calculating. In opportunities I couldn’t take, and places I couldn’t go, and a version of independence I used to have and now have to find other ways around.

I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know when it will leave. I just know it is another thing I carry.

—

I am writing this because there has to be somewhere to put it.

I have tried therapy. I have done the inner work. I have read the books and sat with the feelings and done the things you are supposed to do when you want your life to change. And I believe in all of it; I genuinely do, but today I am just a woman who is tired of the gap between the work and the results.

I don’t want to spend the next twenty years the way I have spent the last thirty.

That is the clearest thought I have right now.

So I am writing it down instead of pretending I am fine.

Because that is what this place is for.

Not the polished version. Not the version where I have already found the lesson and tied it up with something meaningful at the end.

Just today. Just this. Just a woman sitting in the honest middle of a hard day telling the truth about it.

If you are sitting in your own hard day right now-

If you know this particular kind of tired-

If you have ever bought something small and slightly unnecessary just to have thirty minutes where the weight lifted a little-

You are not alone in it.

Neither am I.