The Overwhelm

Mama said there'd be days like these...

Photo cred to George in Boulder

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Ever since I lost my job a year and a half ago, I’ve been frantic. Frantic to pay the bills, to fund my retirement, to figure out health insurance, to find another job, to submit another application. 500+ applications in, and I’ve finally determined that no one wants to hire a 54-year-old woman with 25+ years of experience when they can hire a 25-year-old with no experience and pay them substantially less. I still submit them, though. All it takes is one, right? But now there’s a new hustle because the bills aren’t paid, the retirement is far from funded, and the health insurance is expensive. Write more books. Write across genres. Write more essays. Submit more essays. Take more classes. Work on course curriculum to teach classes. Solicit more freelance gigs. Take on more freelance gigs. Have a hysterectomy. Have a total knee replacement. Figure out the meds for both. Figure out getting off the meds for both. Read more books. Read across genres. Read craft books. Learn new ways of writing. Read self-help books. Learn new ways of living. Create writing communities. Be a good literary citizen. Lift up other writers. Stand on the sidelines, cheering. Try to keep your ugly jealousy at bay when others achieve the dreams you’ve been chasing for four decades now. Admire the writers who made it happen in their 20s and 30s and 40s as you start to panic about the number of years you have left to try. Figure out where to establish roots. Learn that it’s not in Central Florida. Try to figure out what’s next. Research gay-friendly areas that have full-time RV spots. And meanwhile, day-to-day life goes on. The cooking. The emails. The texts. The phone calls. The dinners with friends. The pickleball outings. The mail. The shopping. I’m not as physically busy as I was when I was raising four kids under the age of five, but the mental load is overwhelming. My brain is always on, always searching, always reaching, always looking for the next thing.

My wise and wonderful friend,

Matt Bays

, says that’s the bane of the creative—the continuous search, the never-ending restlessness, the quest for more. Always, the quest for more.

And this world. This broken, heart-wrenching world. The carnage in Gaza. The carnage in our schools. The carnage of this nation. This horrible, divisive man who wants to take over our country for his own personal gain and control. The crazy, rambling speeches that he gives, the ridiculous lies he spouts, the misogyny, the hate, the spoken desire to be a dictator, and some still want to give him the nuclear codes. And those who follow him because they believe the promise of lower taxes and cheaper groceries is more important than female bodily autonomy, basic human rights, and taking care of those less fortunate. And those who wear AR-15 pins on their lapels because their lives and their livelihoods are funded by the gun lobby while bereaved parents continue to bury their children who died in classrooms. It’s maddening. It’s repulsive. They keep me awake at night, these twisted atrocities. These unresolvable incongruencies.

I want to gather my babies back into my arms and keep them safe and warm and close. But life dictates that we have to let our babies go. That they’re not really ours to begin with. That they are their own. That we just feed them and love them and teach them and nurture them for a short time, and then we let them go. And they jump out of airplanes and ski down dangerous inclines and hike up great heights with mountain lions waiting in the wings and walk to work in the dangerous dark and anything could happen to them at any time, and there’s nothing—not one thing—to stop something bad from befalling them. Or something good. But those aren’t worries, those are celebrations. Because they get to live their lives. And we get to stand by and watch these humans who grew in our bodies walk around in the world outside of us, unfettered, unprotected, living their own big, beautiful lives apart from ours.

And friends, I’m tired. Really, really tired. My knee hurts. My body hurts. My head hurts. My heart hurts.

Doesn’t yours?

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“Later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere”

Warsan Shire