is it just me or is life just a lot?

confessions of a not-so-dramatic drama queen

This one might work better listening than reading. If you want to hear it in my voice, unpracticed and just read aloud in how I’m feeling at the moment, click the link above to listen in the post.

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My therapist says I’m alright, and I guess she would know.

It seems to me like I cry an awful lot in our monthly sessions, like I cry an awful lot nearly every day.

I told her I feel like I’m a bit of a roller coaster. When she asked for an example, I recounted that so far, that day alone, I’d been fine, then had been intensely angry, had wept and written in a white-hot rage for an hour, and was currently again feeling fine, having pulled myself together just in time to turn to a fresh page in my journal and neatly label the top with the date of our session, like I was calmly preparing to take notes in class. And all of that, I added, was a pretty good synopsis of how I feel day-to-day, week-to-week, riding the waves of intense emotions.

I expected all this to sound a bit dramatic.

She laughed good-naturedly and was not a bit bothered.

Well, okay then.

It turns out that what feels like mad hysteria to me is perhaps just me learning to feel my actual emotions instead of trying to suppress them.

What a ride.

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I read the novel Sandwich a few months ago, and last week I watched the movie Nightbitch. I was attracted to the second by what it seemed to have in common with the first: raw honesty about the visceral rage and grief that are baked in to womanhood and motherhood.

The protagonists of both—one a menopausal mom of adult children and the other an artist in the throes of stay-at-home-momdom with a toddler—are often so angry it’s scary.

And I think that is the appeal of both to me. I am fascinated by the anger. I am hungry for portrayals of the intensity I feel inside.

Yes, me too, I think as motherhood morphs Amy Adams into a wild animal. Sometimes I feel like I could go on the prowl like that too.

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I guarantee you wouldn’t know it to look at me, curled blonde hair and a cardigan, all our family photos looking like Christmas cards.

And I genuinely love my husband and my child, but so do the women in these stories. And that’s a key component of why I find them so compelling and relatable: it’s complicated.

You love your partner, you love your child(ren), you love being a mom, you wouldn’t take any of it back… except would you maybe?

No! Of course not! you think. And you could never voice that question because no one voices that question. And what kind of horrible mother are you to even entertain the thought for a second?

And it’s not so much that you want to take any of it back… it’s just you miss who you were or who you were going to be… or something. You didn’t expect things to change so much or for things to stay so mindnumbingly the same either, stuck in the same cycles of housework and childcare, like a hamster on a wheel.

And you didn’t understand, still don’t understand, does anyone understand? how your biology is influencing the dance between who you are and what you think and how you feel.

I’m 37 years old, and for the first time in my life, I’m trying to understand the ebbs and flows of the chemicals in my female body. An app on my phone cheerfully tells me that I may feel more creativity and energy as estrogen rises. It tries to cajole me into being gentler with myself during the weeks of the month when my energy is likely to be lower.

I don’t know if any of it is correct or if any of it is helping, but it is making me feel less crazy.

I appreciate the reminders that feeling like I’m on a roller coaster makes sense given that there’s rickety merry-go-round of hormones spinning in me all the time.

I find it encouraging to be reminded that the intensity of the feelings I experience are at least somewhat due to the body I live in. They are not all in my head. They are not all in my heart. They are not completely tied to my faithfulness or lack thereof. They are largely not under my control. They are part of being a woman. They are part of being human.

They are feelings. They probably have something to tell me. And most of the time, they’re probably not trying to tell me something earth-shattering, though I tend to jump to existential conclusions.

They’re usually just telling me that I’m sad and that’s okay because grief needs expression to be processed. Or that I’m angry and that’s okay because if I recognize I’m angry, I can go to the person I’m angry with and seek resolution, instead of holding that conflict inside and letting it smolder as buried resentment (which is what I usually do).

And sometimes they’re just telling me I need a snack. Or to rest. Or to do something that brings me joy again.

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So, I’m trying to not fight myself so much. Trying to let out how I feel, even if that feels like howling at the moon.

“If you’re afraid you’re being too dramatic,” my therapist says, “you are probably not.”

And I cry and I laugh because they used to say that I was so “dramatic” when I was a kid, and I’ve spent my whole life since being afraid that I am too dramatic and trying not to be.

Are you healing a childhood wound right now? I think, as she assures me again, that, from everything she knows about me, she finds it hard to imagine that I would ever approach anything without thoughtfulness, kindness, and measured words. I don’t have to worry about being too dramatic.

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Well, alright then.

Maybe I’ll go on a rampage. Or maybe I’ll finally start speaking up for myself every now and then.

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And I’ve not even touched on all there is in the world to be grieved and enraged by.

While I’m trying to process what’s in my own house, my own head, my own life, there’s so much more outside of my little bubble and so far out of my control.

I 100% need to quit Instagram, but every now and then the algorithm sends me something helpful. And the other day, it was this reel, that felt like a good synopsis of the anxiety and grief constantly stoked by current events.

I hope you’ll watch it to see what I mean, but basically the person in the video is acting out a skit in which she investigates her feeling that “the world is ending.” As she explores this general anxiety, she becomes more specific and names what’s going on. The feeling that is felt as anxiety is actually grief. Anger and grief.

abbiesr

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We’re all going through a lot. The world is going through a lot. Our bodies are going through a lot. Our hearts and spirits are going through a lot.

There is a lot of reason for grief, for anger, for fear.

I love Jesus, but that’s not getting me off this roller coaster, and I’ve stopped thinking it’s supposed to.

And that’s all I have to say for today. This world is a lot. Life is a lot.

And if you feel like you’re going through it and maybe not doing so well, me too. Me too.

Don’t be fooled by whatever I might seem like on the outside. I’m losing my shit on the inside most of the time. And apparently, that’s normal.