It's hard to feel like you always have to have your shit together. It's harder to feel like you never have your shit together. It's hardest to feel like you always have to have your shit together and also that you never have your shit together.
In this moment, I'm tired. I'm just, like, really tired. I'm tired of feeling like I'm not doing anything right even though I am trying really, really fucking hard. I'm tired of feeling like I have to try really fucking hard because nothing comes naturally to me. I'm tired of being sad or mad or crying or whatever. I'm tired of the whiplash that is my current emotional trajectory. Sometimes I'm just tired of feeling so much.
Perhaps quite obviously I am writing this from a hard moment. I'm feeling like that kid whose finger plugged the dam, except my dam is full of holes and I am whack-a-mole-ing them with only ten fingers.
Emotions are hard for me. I feel like I'm not very good at them. I feel like I should've mastered my emotions by this point in my life. Maybe it's that I feel every single emotion as much as possible. When you're little, you think, "oh, I'll have this all figured out when I grow up!" Then you grow up and you know less now than you did before. I rarely feel a little happy or a little sad. I don't have giant peaks and valleys all day every day; I guess most days I'm able to regulate my emotions in a mostly healthy way. However, when my emotional cup runneth over, I feel it all over, and more often than not, it manifests as tears streaming down my face. It's not always a full-blown cry, but tears are always present in some form.
I happy-cry a lot. I may watch a commercial that's too sweet or see a picture of a dog on Facebook that just looks too precious, and I tear up a bit. The end of rom-coms always get me. I remember when I first watched Adam Sandler's "Click" I cried, like legit cried, at the end. I definitely shed a few tears when Luke Skywalker made his appearance at the end of the Mandalorian. I got choked up the other day walking past a dad and his kids in their front yard; he had raked up all their leaves and the kids were doing their best to un-rake them. I ugly-cried when Beau proposed and choked back tears when we got married. I cried (maybe tears of relief) when RB was finally born. I got emotional the other day when I was throwing the ball for Hap and he caught it off of a big bounce. He was so freakin' proud and I was so happy for him. I let out a few "this is too sweet" tears to John Legend's "Wonder Woman" the other day. I can't have a Werther's Original without a lump in my throat up because of the happy memories I associate with it.
I sad-cry a lot too. I cry because I feel like a failure in a lot of facets of my life. I cry because I may try to explain how I'm feeling in an attempt to make things better, only to make them worse. I definitely tear up every time we watch John Wick and I have to witness Daisy's fate. I cry when people are disappointed in me. I cry when I'm disappointed in myself. I cry when I can't get the words out to communicate how I'm actually feeling. I cry about how there are babies in the world that don't get the love, attention, and safety our son does, and how I wish I could fix that. I cry over the epidemic that is fentanyl every single time I see another person having perished from it. I cry for the people we've lost and that they don't get to meet our son. I get choked up over spilled milk (literally, spilled breast milk is a tear-jerker). I cry to sad songs all the time. P!nk recently released a song titled "When I Get There," and it got me right in the heartstrings. I cry over the unrealistic expectations I place on myself and my very realistic inability to meet them. I cry because I worry about how the fuck am I going to be a good mother when I feel like a literal dumpster fire mess half the time. I legit cried the other day when we discovered our standing freezer had been left open and all my frozen breast milk had thawed.
I've always been like this from what I can remember. I kind of remember once complaining to my mom about it, about how I'm so dramatic and I wish I could just feel things like a normal person (whatever that means), and how I wish I didn't cry so damn much. I remember her saying something about how it's a beautiful thing that I feel things so deeply, and that a lot of people may never feel one thing as deeply as I feel everything. Very poetic, Elizabeth.
Motherhood seems to have exacerbated this for me. Is it postpartum hormones? Is it a new capacity for love that is both exhilarating and terrifying? Is it exhaustion? Is it desperation for everything to be perfect (which ironically leads to nothing being perfect)? Is it overstimulation? Is it a lack of self-care? Does it stem from an inability to ask for help? Do I already know the answer? I'm selecting D) All Of The Above.
Today is a hard day. Actually, let's break it down even further - if I look at this 24-hour period in quarters, this last quarter was a hard quarter. Used to, I had the luxury of wallowing in my bad feelings. I could be sad and throw a little pity party. I could drink a little too much wine and go to bed feeling like shit and get up and feel like shit the next day. Motherhood pretty much puts a cap on that. I don't really have the luxury of feeling like shit on my own schedule anymore. My bad feelings are not RB's doing and honestly, they're not anyone's responsibility but my own. I guess I've soaked in self-pity for the few minutes I spent writing this, so I'll make like Elsa and let it go.
Thanks for listening to whatever the fuck this was.
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Hello from the other side. Today is the date after I posted this; I reread it and seriously considered deleting it. Is it too much? I often feel like maybe I'm too much. This post is a hard post for me to leave up, but I'm going to do so. No one has all good days, and anyone who says they do is a fuckin' liar. If you are sitting at your computer shaking your head saying, "Oh, I only have good days," then I am calling you a liar, buddy. We don't talk about our bad days anymore, not in this manicured social media age we live in. Everything is aesthetic and all smiles, or it's not seen. I promised myself that I would not apologize for what I feel or what I write when I started this little online diary I am calling a blog. When I was toying with the idea of starting this site, a big part of me was like, "Who gives a shit what you have to say, Grace?" A smaller, meeker voice responded, "Maybe no one but me. If I care, then that should be enough." I'd like to flip the ratio on those voices. To keep my promise to past Grace, the one who felt bold enough to start this blog, and bold enough to post it and share with family and friends, and who yesterday felt strong enough to write out her shitty feelings and post them on the internet for strangers to either judge, commiserate, or sympathize with, I'm going to leave this up. Maybe some other new mom will read this and realize she's not losing her mind, and if she is, then she is not alone. Maybe someone having a shitty day will read this and be like "hell yeah! Shitty-day-havers unite!" Or maybe this will just exist for me next time I need to remind myself bad feelings are just temporary and I should honestly try to get over myself a little.
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