A good friend recently left her job and asked for encouragement. The details weren’t clear (and if they were, I wouldn’t be sharing them here) because all she really needed was a hug, and was willing to settle for internet hugs. (I give awesome internet hugs, FYI. Awkward real hugs, but awesome internet hugs.)
The details really didn’t matter. There are some people who get all manner of weird shit thrown at them, or who create all manner of difficult problems for themselves, but manage to work it out. The dealt-a-bad-hand v. made-bad-choices debate isn’t actually the point here. When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, whether you tripped, got pushed, or dove in head-first, can you make your way out? (Avoiding gaping holes in the earth altogether is another skill set entirely.)
In the case of this friend, I say: absolutely. When I was telling her this, though, it dawned on me that calling her “capable” might not mean as much to her as I thought it would. This is a sincere question: do other people appreciate “capable” as a compliment?
Personally, it would mean a lot. In other recent-random-exchanges-with-friends-that-are-all-very-timely-or-more-likely-an-indication-of-where-my-head-is-at, I told a friend in Paris that I have a bad habit of avoiding situations as a result of my intense hatred of feeling incompetent. I’m certain that I have blogged about this before, because it’s high on my list of Most Unpleasant Feelings Ever in the History of Everdom. (Oh, Dustin from Real World: Las Vegas, I miss you on my television. You were such a poet.)
I have this whole post drafted about my life now versus a few years ago. It’s a big Life Is Awesome Now! thing, with only vague allusions to the ways that life is less than awesome now. I wrote it a week ago, but haven’t hit publish because it feels dishonest and overly roses and magic and unicorns.
For all the ways that Facebook gives us an obnoxious benchmark to measure ourselves against (“Look at how happy everyone is with their marriages and babies and stuff! They are smiling in all the pictures! THEY MUST BE SMILING ALWAYS. WHY AM I NOT SMILING ALWAYS??”) I found it a brave and powerful thing for my friend to be open and honest like that. She turned that space, however briefly, into a reminder that everyone is going through similar shit. There is a lot of comfort in that.
All of that being said, that roses-and-magic draft that makes me uncomfortable has a message I stand by, albeit with less glittering language: the most valuable change that I have observed in my life in the last few years is my sense that I can get through shit. There are lots of things that past versions of myself had that I’d maybe like, but I’d never trade places with any of them, because I would not give this knowledge up for anything. I’ll take the ugly and the comfort of knowing I can survive it over some magic moments tainted by the fear that I am not capable enough to handle the next, less pretty moment.
Really, if I could go back and convince past me of anything, it would be this: you’re going to figure it out.
I’m not trying to shit on the idea that it gets better, but that would seem like a dishonest thing to say to my 15 year old self, because that girl is going to get suckerpunched by life in ways she can’t yet comprehend (hence the suckerpunch). She’s also going to make some really stupid decisions. So, yeah, lots of things are going to get worse, rather than better. A whole fucking lot.
I know backwards is not an option, not even a tiny bit backwards, because I’ve only very recently internalized this idea. I am just now coming to see that for all the times I have been incapacitated, in bed for days convinced that there’s no way out, somehow I always managed. I worked things out. All the things. One way or another.
This isn’t to undermine the fact that often the solution was “asking for help” and that I owe a great deal to many people. I owe the kind of debts that can’t ever really be repaid,; I owe the kind of debts that just become a part of you and your relationships. I also owe a lot of the actual monetary debts that cause people to call me a millionty times if I don’t give them their monies on time. Those debts too. A lot of debts. Debts of many shapes and sizes.
What I want to say to both my friend and, quite obviously, myself, is that for all the nonsense that currently makes me want to crawl into bed and marathon Veronica Mars and never see daylight again, I’ve been here before. (This friend who I swear is not myself but an actual separate human being who I went to college with has also endured a big helping of Big Life Shit. She too has been here before. I bet you have too, friend.) I’ve been there before and I (or someone dear to me) fixed it. (So has she.)
I’m not in the “looking for hugs of any variety” place right now, but based on the fact that half of my drafts deal with this idea in some form or another, it’s safe to say that it’s a fair assessment of my current headspace. I’m in a hole. One I put myself in, I might add. It sucks and it’s scary but I can’t help but notice how much less scary it is than the last time I was in a place like this. The difference, quite simply, is that I no longer question whether I’ll get out of here. I will. One way or another.