crutch

i often listen with admiration as people talk about how great they feel after eliminating certain foods from their diet, full of energy and clarity, yet i cling heavily to the coffee crutch under one arm and the ice cream crutch under the other. some discipline would do me good! in the same way, social media is a crutch that seems to not only fuel my day but it ultimately backfires and causes me harm. comparison, jealousy, depression, anger, sadness, lonliness.

i deleted my facebook account the other day. thanks to a hacker and harassment, though the nudge was probably what i needed.

will anyone notice? will i be missed? does it really matter? NO. how will i receive validation without the likes? where will i turn when i have a complaint or victory to announce?

God.

family.

real life connections. ugh these are hard these days. during a pandemic when we are to isolate and stick to our bubbles. my bubble seems quite lonely lately. as i sat in my doctor’s office scouring over lab results, searching for an explanation for why i feel so dang terrible and sad and tired and on many days like the world would be better off without me. i look at my daughter, her vibrance and absolute joy for life and remember being like her once, but now just feel like an empty shell. he compassionately listened to all i have on my shoulders and simply said, “even without a pandemic, you have SO much going on.” being a single mom sucks. the mom part is truly a blessing and i try to cherish every dang second but the alone part is painful. it’s hard and exhausting and it never really seems to get much easier. we did find an explanation and it was still….depression. i was grasping at straws for a more visible explanation, one that would actually make sense to the people in my life who can’t comprehend my disease. the ones that aren’t comfortable with it. i’m a nurse and i understand the pathophysiology of what’s happening in my brain and as a result to my body and i’m uncomfortable with it. it’s mental illness. that means i’m “crazy,” right? whatever it means, to me, it’s torture and debilitating and the social impacts of this pandemic seem to be magnified for me.

my son started kindergarten the other day. i walked into work in a fog after i dropped him off. i then realized that i was fighting back tears. crossing these milestones and monumentous events of my children without a partner is this weird lonliness that is so hard to describe. i imagined my friends this morning, moms and dads, together, scurrying around the house getting their little ones ready for their first day of school, eating breakfast together and wrangling them for pictures. i imagined the smiles they shared with each other as they watched their little one walk into school with their oversized backpack on their back. it got to me. deep.

“Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me,

My grace is enough; it’s all you need.
My strength comes into its own in your weakness.

Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.” 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 (MSG)

oh how i long for this. to take my limitations with good cheer.

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