Bags and baggage

Before you start feeling sorry for me about all of my health and other problems, consider this.  If everyone put their own troubles and tribulations into bags, set them on a table, and heard what everyone else's true problems were, you would scramble madly to be able to retrieve your own bag full of setbacks.  And I feel exactly the same way.  Most people aren't honest about their problems, so it always looks as if the grass is greener everywhere else.  Not that I blame people.  When someone asks me how I am, I almost always respond in a false manner.  Not many people actually care, so why burden them with the truth?  From the outside, I look like I have my shit together and am crushing it at life.  From the inside, well, not many people have a good view of my true thoughts and fears.  This blog is helping me to get past the constant need to hide all of that and come clean when I'm scared or anxious.


Would it be wonderful or awful to know that most people are just as miserable as we are sometimes?  I know someone in her late 40s who said she's never had an anxiety attack.  To me, that sends the wrong message to kids who are still learning about life.  When I was younger, I felt like an oddball, thinking no one else ever had these moments of doubt and fear.  Fuck, I still get them, thankfully not as often as I did.  But pretending they aren't here, to put on a polite face, seems wrong.  Sorry, not sorry, to inconvenience you, but to paraphrase someone much wiser than me, Life means suffering sometimes.  It's how we grow.


Fortunately, no one gave me such sage advice a few months ago when I was crying in the shower (or in my pillow or in my car or you get the picture).  If they had, I might have punched them in the face.  Probably not, because that would hurt my knuckles.  More likely, I would have kicked them.  After I put shoes on.  That would have been a lot of work during a crying jag, so let's all be happy I didn't need to.  But now that I can be semi-rational, I know it's true.


So next time you start feeling down, and you will, because life means suffering sometimes, remember that we all go through it.  It's part of our humanity.  Rum helped mine temporarily, just saying.

DISCLAIMER: I do not recommend rum to anyone with addiction issues.  Also, I heard recently about a study involving rats, addiction, and Rat-opia.  Basically, they concluded that substance addictions are from excessive loneliness.  So start making friends.  I know it's hard, but some of them are worth it.  And you definitely are.  How do I know?  Because you're reading my blog.  Duh.