Being Human is Exhausting
A vent about life currently being overwhelming
Three weeks ago tomorrow, I drove home from a great vacation in Knoxville TN, Dollywood, and Asheville NC. It could not have been a more perfect trip. One of my oldest friends spent an unfathomable amount of money for 8th row tickets for us to see Heart for what will probably be their last tour. We used some black Friday specials to get a good deal on Dollywood tickets, since Knoxville is about an hour from Dollywood, and had a really fun long weekend. Then, I went to see my parents who live in Asheville, and hiked by myself for the first time since my leg break and CRPS diagnosis in 2024. Life felt pretty damn good. The astrology for March was a little bit dismal but the month ended without having made too much of an impact.
Then April said, “are you reaaaaady?”
If you are not hearing someone from an early 2000s nu-metal band in your head as you read that phrase, please click here and listen to timestamp 0:48-0:53 because those 5 seconds are important context. Don’t listen to the whole song though; most of society lost the ability to listen to a whole Korn song around 2001 and that is valid. Anyhow.
Less than 12 hours after I arrived home from Asheville, a 9 hour drive that was 10-1/2 hours with stops, I was in the emergency room with what turned out to be a 5mm kidney stone. I have an unfinished post about that, so I won’t get too into it. We spent about 5 hours in the emergency room and picked up breakfast when we left. Almost as soon as we sat down at home, the phone rang. My stepdaughter said she was taking her grandmother, my spouse Jon’s mom, to the ER because she had been in severe pain for 3 days. That was April 5th and she hasn’t left the hospital since. The stress of juggling my health emergency, her health crisis, trying to get back to work…it’s all been so much. Nearly too much. The constant stress of having a loved one in the ICU for weeks really begins to wear on you. It’s not acute, so no one needs to be off work, but that could change at any time. After a couple days in the hospital she had surgery, and has been in ICU since the surgery. Her status has been eractic. Things will start to get better and we will collectively breathe a sigh of relief and then she will have a setback. Not a major setback but not a minor setback either. Is a medium setback a thing?
During my kidney stone emergency, I had to take an unexpected week off of work - after already being out a week for vacation which was very upsetting. I hate having to cancel on clients but doing so after having already not seen them the week prior was really difficult emotionally, yet physically I had no choice. This morning, I hit a breaking point. Just when I was getting back into some kind of routine, I heard a weird noise from the kitchen as I was putting in my contacts. My 15 year old dog Caroline, who has arthritis and has lost 90% of her hearing but somehow manages to get in as much trouble as a puppy would, got into a bin of gardening supplies. Either I didn’t close the tin inside of the bin all of the way or I may have left them on top of it, I truly can’t remember. Regardless, she ripped open a plastic bag that I had stored caladium bulbs in over the winter, and ate them. Google helpfully says: “If you suspect your dog has ingested a caladium bulb, contact your veterinarian immediately.” SIGH.
It was 8:20am and I had a client at 9am. A client whose last session I’d had to cancel because of my kidney stone removal procedure. I felt completely overwhelmed. The vet said call the ASPCA poison control line and they kept me on hold for 15 minutes before I talked to someone. By that point it was nearly 8:40am, there was no way I was going to be able to have a session at 9am. Even if poison control said everything was fine, I was only half ready for work and understandly worked up. I have never felt like a worse therapist than I did in the moment where I had to contact that client and ask them to reschedule again.
I know that I can’t expect myself to not be human. There will of course be times when life, through no fault of my own, impacts my clients. This was just one thing too many and for about 45 minutes I felt like I suck at life.
Thankfully, Caroline is fine but even though I know I don’t suck at life or as a therapist, I just can’t take more fucking stress. As much as I love owning my practice and not having a boss, when you decide to start a business you really cannnot fathom how much you will miss being able to just call in sick to a job when necessary. Of course, it would still impact my clients and I would still feel guilty but there’s a buffer that you don’t get when you’re also thinking about how no sessions = no income and there’s a letter from the IRS that says God knows what that you haven’t opened yet. This part is champagne problems, I know. It’s a privilege and I’m never not grateful that I happen to have a special interest that allows me to make a living and be self employed.
Jon’s mom is still in the ICU with no projected date of discharge. When she does leave the hospital, she will have to go to a nursing home for rehabilitation. I am grateful that I don’t currently have a kidney stone. Caroline has to be monitored for the next day or two but seems to be fine. If I believed in God the way I conceptualized him as a child, I would pray and ask him to please let this be the last of the stress for a little while. Now I’m a metaphysical spiritual not religious person with a mainly Buddhist viewpoint who knows that it will be however it is, no matter how I deal with it. This could be the last of it or it could be 12 more things back to back. None of it means anything except that suffering is normal part of the human experience. I often tell clients that we have control over very little. We can either view that as upsetting or a relief - doesn’t matter either way because the situation is the same. Most days, the universe not depending on me to hold it all together is an immense relief but today, I wish that I was in charge so that I could make sure nothing else happens.
