I’m just so broken right now.
Life has a way of smacking you in the face. Sometimes, it smacks you so hard you fall to the ground and have to struggle to get back up. On rare occasions, it stands over you as you lay on the ground, spitting in your face and hitting you over and over.
Naturally, life eventually gets bored of beating the crap out of you and offers a helping hand, pulling you back onto your feet before pushing you back to the ground and peeing on you.
This has been my experience with life at least.
And the thing is, I haven’t even had the worst life has to offer. But we aren’t really built for comparing our bad experiences to other people’s, we’re better at seeing when others have things good while we suffer.
On one end of the spectrum, you have nepo-kids, who have everything handed to them and get daddy or mommy to swoop in and save them when they do stupid shit like wreck the Ferrari or get too drunk at the party. These are the people you can’t really find it in your heart to feel sorry for because their problems are typically self-inflicted.
On the other end you have the people who are stuck in the worst of the worst locations. I’m talking war-torn countries where indoor plumbing and even basic medical care are unheard of. These are the people the nepo-babies pretend to care about when pleading for community service and planning their next PR campaign.
Then there’s the land most of us live in.
Going paycheck to paycheck, managing somehow to juggle the needs with the occasional want. The house is barely big enough, but it suffices. We sometimes make bad choices, but often things happen to us rather than us bringing the hammer down on ourselves. The occasional night out is met with guilt and knowing that some in society would say we don’t deserve any kind of pleasure because we aren’t exactly middle-class enough.
For me, life has been about figuring things out.
I was about 13 years old when my mother made the selfish decision to have a fourth child. This was selfish because she already had 3 healthy kids, which was 3 more than the doctors told her she’d be able to have given that she was born with one kidney and wasn’t supposed to even make it to adulthood. I guess she figured she’d beaten the odds before, what was one more risk?
From late 1999 until 2005 she would spend about 3 days a week hooked up to a dialysis machine. She rarely sat through the whole treatment, and would sometimes even skip them. This was yet another selfish move that would likely lead to her life being drastically shortened, and she would pass away on July 4, 2005, leaving my siblings and I with one less parent.
I was 19, barely out of high school, but I had it easy compared to my younger brothers and 5-year-old sister who was barely able to comprehend why mommy wouldn’t wake up.
I’d spent the better part of those last few years of my mother’s life acting as her confidant, shoulder to cry on and part time parent to my younger sister as my step-dad struggled to handle his wife’s condition. It would take me years to fully accept her death and everything I went through during my teen years, and to this day there are so many questions I wish I could ask her.
My young adult years were spent making my own mistakes and eventually failing my own children in many ways. I joined the army to try and get my life together, and I learned what it meant to sacrifice for others and put the mission before myself. My time in the army, and moreso the few years directly following that time, helped me grow up and actually start making something of myself.
Not only that, I finally grew into fatherhood.
Having no real good father figure in my life, I really sucked at being a dad. I tried, but I failed over and over and found myself feeling like I owed my kids so much more than I could ever give them.
I finally started to really get ahead when I found a career in IT, and I thought that would be the thing that would catapult me into the future. We were finally in a good place financially, and with a big move in 2021 I found myself even making six-figures for the first time in my life. It was a goal I’d had, but one I didn’t think possible as many people never get to that mark.
Then 2022 happened.
By June of that year I found myself laid off and searching for a way forward. Thankfully, I happen to be married to the most amazing partner, my best friend that’s been by my side for 2 decades, and we worked together to make things work over the remainder of the year. We were determined to keep that one bad thing from taking us down, and by the end of the year she was making enough to get by as I was starting school.
2023 would prove to be an up and down year, with the middle of the year once more proving to be a problem time as I suffered a spider bite that landed me in the hospital and nearly ended my life. I still have a scar from that bite where the tissue was necrotic, and I don’t know if it’ll ever fully heal.
Despite that hiccup, I was able to release a couple of books in 2023 and had high hopes for 2024 as it rolled in like a steam engine.
But tragedy would strike once again in the middle of the year as my son, who spent the last day of school home sick, would decline health wise to the point where he would be admitted to the hospital thanks to a severe case of pneumonia. Though he would later say the life flight he had to take was more fun than he expected, a 2 week stay with a tube in his side to drain fluid from his chest would erase any positive feeling.
We hoped that would be the end of it, but an X-Ray in October, showing scarring on his lung that hadn’t gone away as expected, would lead to surgery being scheduled and several doctor visits, as well as 2 more stays in the hospital (as of the time of this writing).
It’s frankly been enough to really eat away at any hope we have of anything positive in our future.
For my wife and I’s part, we’ve mainly tried to stay focused on the fact that we have each other to lean on, and we’ve been each other’s rock through all of this. We’re thankful our son was able to make it through surgery, with a better-than-expected outcome, and we’re even confident, despite all indications to the contrary, that he’ll be alright in the end.
What’s really frustrating, is that all the things outside of our control seem to just be mounting against us. All we really want is to raise our kids, keep them healthy and prepare them for adulthood, and then spend our lives making up for lost time. That doesn’t really require much, but it does require some kind of good luck.
A little more perspective comes in the form of one of our recent business failures. We started a business together in early 2024, selling a combination of candles and wax melts she makes alongside books I write. A couple of errors notwithstanding, we also had some of the weirdest shit I’ve ever seen happen to us.
One thing that made me almost quit completely revolved around one of our shows in the fall. We’d expected it to be one of the best shows of the year, and had been looking forward to it for months. As the show drew near, we discovered it was the final year they would be having it, and we were even more excited to be participating in what promised to be an amazing sendoff.
A week or two before the event, however, mother nature got involved in the form of a massive hurricane forming in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This storm, one of those “once in a century” kind of storms, worked its way onto the mainland, destroying homes and lives along the way, before landing in central Ohio just in time for this show we had been working up to.
Now, in the 20+ years they’d been holding this event, they’d never had more than a sprinkle, but that would change as 40-50 mph winds and driving rain ruined the whole thing. As I stood there, holding onto our tent for dear life, I wondered if things could possibly get any worse.
By the end of it, the tent we’d had all summer, that had held up through a severe storm a couple months prior, was destroyed. We were able to save most of the merchandise we’d brought with us, but it was one time that made us question everything.
It’s just one of those things that makes you wonder, who did I piss off? The fact that a storm like that would hit at just the right time, it just hit us so hard among everything else that’s been thrown our way in recent years.
Of course, it does go back to perspective, because a lot of people lost their lives and homes in that same storm, but perspective only takes you so far.
At the moment, I’m just angry at life in general despite the silver linings that exist.
And that’s OK. It’s alright to be angry when things haven’t been going your way, even as you acknowledge they could always be worse. It’s perfectly acceptable to vent and scream and shake your fist at the sky.
And at the end of the day, it’s sometimes very helpful to just get it all out there, even if it’s only for yourself and will never be seen by another person.