anchor.

Like most of you, I spend a large part of my day wandering around in my head — thinking about the last year and a half (or the last maybe 20 years or so).

Sometimes it’s hard to process a life publicly and having your friends and parents worry or take some sort of blame for who you are and how you turned out. I’m not saying my family didn’t impact the person I am today, but at some point you shift over into your choices and the events that made you who you are today.

There are plenty of people that I love that hold the impossible weight of their failures and short comings. I watch it weigh them down like an anchor slogging its way on the sea’s floor, whipping up bits and pieces of a scattered old world.

I’ve had to drop a lot of things to keep up forward motion. These days I just don’t have much room to hold on too tightly to anything. A lesson I learned early in my life is that heaviness and heartbreak are blind and reckless and fall on anyone, at any time. Learning that there isn’t a rhyme or reason for the world (or your tiny world) to fall on your shoulders holds some kind of strange creature comfort.

Most things are not your fault, and just by existing you are enough for this world.

Yeah, you’re going to whiff some things. You’re going to screw up and break someone’s heart (ultimately your own). Maybe one of the biggest things I’ve learned lately is that people are resilient as hell and most feelings really don’t last forever. Some of us are just wired differently. We hold on to things longer while still feeling them deeply — sometimes there isn’t justice.

Sometimes, we just have to live with a thing.

Being alive on this planet comes with responsibilities. One of the better ones is leaving it better than you found it.

Along the way, you’re going to find yourself wrapped up in impossible things. A work load that is too much — a failed relationship — maybe letting down your kids.
(In fact most of you have already done these things and will continue to do these things because being human is a lot of responsibility and messing up is part of the gig.)

I feel like it’s important to create the space to mourn your losses. You can even keep them to yourself as wisdom. I would ask that while you hold them to not let them hold you back from experiencing more life.

I have seen grief and I have seen grief lived.
What I want to say is that joy (and forgiveness) rips grief apart.

We’re all tired from *gestures broadly at everything* this stuff.
Some days getting out of bed feels like chaos. That once my feet hit the floor you are moving and moving into something you can’t control. Make sure you give yourself some space from the chaos to collect yourself. Truly nothing gets better unless you do.

This is mostly my reminder to be good to yourself even with all the odds stacked against you. To put down arms and stop lobbing grenades for a while.

As my little friend Birdie says, “Hey guys. Stop. Just breathe.”

Take it from her.

stop.
(and breathe.)

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