The Life You Have
I spent a couple miserable weeks feeling sorry for myself recently. In totality, it was about five very miserable weeks, but only two of them were completely self-inflected. The others were due to illness.
The self-inflicted misery began one night, while I was at home alone.
My husband, outdoorsman that he is, had taken our two kiddos camping with his brother. And so naturally, I stayed home for some "me time.” On the second night, I watched The Notebook. I love that movie. It’s so good. And after watching it, I decided that we should have a love like Noah and Allie. I also decided to go down memory lane, and think of many of the mistakes I have made.
To top it off, I went on Instagram and decided to envy the lives of certain select others. I spent considerable time doing this.
And then I spent two weeks miserable, mad at my own life for not being all I once dreamed & hoped it would be. It didn’t occur to me during this time that I was making myself miserable. At the lowest point, I looked at my husband point in the face and told him I hated my life. Nice, right? Then I spent the next hour feeling bad about saying it, since my life is objectively very good.
Finally came the reckoning. What am I doing? I am pining over a life that is not mine, reliving the past, looking at other people’s lives and comparing them to mine. Even writing it now, it seems more like something I did in high school or college… but now? After all the growth and life experience?
Like the children of Israel, I was - metaphorically speaking - wandering in the desert. Everything looked beige. Not a good beige. No accents. Barely any texture. Just monotone, and hard, and boring. Like I was colorblind to life.
I don’t know what exactly pulled me out of this trance. But Katherine Wolf’s words sure helped. Katherine survived a brain stroke many years ago, and while her life was spared, her physical body was not. She lives with this hardship. And it gives her words that much more power. “The life I have is the life I have,” she recently said in a Lecrae interview.
Good point. I better get to living and make the most of it, because regret & resentment is not the way.
It almost goes without saying that most of us has things we want to change about our lives, and some of them we have very good reason to want to change.
Our work then becomes discerning what is in our power to change, and what is truly beneficial to change. There are certain things we must change, or they will kill us (emotionally, spiritually, physically). And there are other things - hardships even - that might not change. This might be a physical ailment, a past decision we cannot undo, a family member we wish was different….
These areas present us with opportunity and choice. What does it look like to truly make the best of this?
It might mean acceptance, it might mean boundaries, it might mean more bike rides and less social media. It might mean a break-up, it might mean forgiveness. I don’t know what it means for you.
As someone with a dominant perfectionist part, this is hard for me. I want my life to look like the storybook version I painted in my beautiful mind when I was eight - where work was optional, and I was madly in love and perpetually swept off my feet by someone who took care of me. I still want a beach house, and for everyone to like me and think I’m great, and to be invited to all of the parties.
But that is not my life.
Work is mandatory if I want to pay the mortgage and send our kids to private school. Love feels must more like a choice, rather than something that has happened to me. My husband brings me coffee, buys me flowers, and helps with the laundry. He gets up earlier than me to make the kids breakfast and take them to school. But there are things I long for that I don’t have. So I get to decide: what will I do?
What will you do to take initiative in your own life - in the life you have - to make it beautiful?
