When life is messy
We often hear bloggers or influencers talk about difficult “seasons” of life, spaces of time in our lives that challenge us but that eventually give way to easier and more enjoyable ones. That’s all well and good in retrospect, or when you can escape the trials and tribulations of your current “season” by getting out of the house or paying someone to come in and help you, or when you can lean on your community for guidance and a helping hand.
And sure, we’re privileged and lucky enough to have that backing us up in theory.
But in practicality? We’re still up to our eyeballs in The Unfinished. And it is incredibly draining, and mentally defeating.
I’d like to say this blog post isn’t meant to be a downer or discouraging in any way, but that isn’t the reality that a lot of us are in - right now, and just in general life. There are very real times when you carry the weight of knowing your struggles now are small compared to the struggles you are about to face once you actually achieve your dreams, and that can be incredibly spiral inducing. Asking the universe for a family means you have to take care of that family and withstand the growing pains, asking for a farm means bringing in the harvest and preserving it any way you can even if you’re sick as a dog. It sometimes means letting months and months of work rot in the ground because there are some days or weeks where you just can’t or don’t get it done.
These are hard, unrelenting, and mentally jarring seasons to be in for years at a time. And that’s assuming you’re living your dream.
The grueling, backwards turning, seemingly infinite road to even get to that point is even harder.
So how do you handle it? How do you handle cleaning and scrubbing plywood because you don’t have a real tabletop, or the one you do have disintegrates on contact with your sponge? How do you find a way to look the drywall and mudding look nice because at least it’s not the gaping hole in your ceiling that used to be there? How do you turn a blind eye to your one incontinent cat who decides to pee just inside every front door you’ve ever had, even when there’s clean litterboxes all over the place? How do you deal with with the stacks of groceries and dishes that end up on every surface because the few cabinets you do have in your under-construction kitchen have mice running through them half the time?
How do you carry that mental load when you know it’s your job to figure out how to care for all the things and creatures living inside your house that are all simultaneously dragging you down into tar pits of depression?
How do you take care of the very things that are driving you insane?
I won’t say there aren’t any solutions out there. Some people get rid of everything and everyone in their lives. Some people go into massive debt and end up solving all their problems in the end, and some people struggle with years of pill popping or alcoholism to get through it till the momentum of their work provides relief. Some parents trade years of love and respect from their children for the chance to be a loving ally in their lives while their kids are still living at home, even though the stress of not being around to comfort them or the toll of prioritizing their own to do list makes them physically ill. A lot of people turn to faith - all kinds of faith - and immerse themselves in their practices to provide a much needed buffer.
It’s hard to throw stones, especially when I know damn well that those stories are the ones that inspire me the most to keep going.
Finding a way to curate the massive piles of stuff I can’t afford not to try and sell before donating while simultaneously trying to plan for constantly changing dietary requests - and therefore constantly changing budgetary demands - has an excruciatingly slow process. It’s not a #Goals feeling when our garage dining rooms are still stuffed full of possessions, even though it has all been meticulously sorted through and organized into keep, sell, donate piles. It doesn’t give me hope that the keep pile is rather small, because the task of learning how to handle the sell pile takes all of the brain space back up again. The hubby is on an amazing fitness and self-healing journey that is impacting everyone in his life in compounding positive ways, and with that comes the disassembly and reassembly of grocery lists, product sourcing, and budgeting of our largest household expense besides debt payments - our food bill. Our savings are impacted when changes need to be made that don’t fit into the budget allotted and lately….there have been a lot of changes. Those changes are for the better, but they all come with a price tag. Investing in a home gym so we can live a more home-based life and buying in bulk to ultimately save money down the road all carry high up front costs.
Don’t even get me started on the thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medical bills we leaned on my family to help manage in the last two years to get healthy enough to have children. If it weren’t for my family’s help we would not have been able to invest in our own health the way we did and that scares the utter crap out of me. Asking for help when your own body is the thing you have to love and care for while it simultaneously causes you daily pain and anguish is both humiliating and shame inducing on a whole other level.
I feel the absolute need to share these harder parts of our homestead path (sounds so clean and spiritual, don’t it) because when I stumble across a youtuber who inspires me, or a blogger who makes me binge-read the last ten years of their posts, I find myself scanning and searching desperately for the dark spots. I want to read about the times they go into labor and their entire crop dies and they have to get back on federal food programs and they can’t afford to buy seeds to plant their gardens and how every time they feed their children it triggers a panic attack because they don’t have anyone to help them and all their kids will eat are tortillas all day every day for a week.
I need to know that they’ve felt crushed under the burdens of their own dreams because I need my dreams to be justified by their eventual success.
I need the crippling fears and doubts and knowledge of hard seasons to eventually be worth it because wondering if any of it is worth it has caused me more pain than the actual struggles.
This month has been (and will continue to be) a mixed bag. We signed refinance papers on our house that lowered our monthly mortgage by $150 and locked in the lowest interest rate we will likely ever qualify for in our lifetimes, but traded about $10K worth of principle payments to do it. We’ve made some grocery orders through a new supplier I’m over the moon excited about (lookin at you Azure Standard) because it will save us thousands in the long run, but having to switch over what we consume means stocking up all over again on “new” essentials and we blew the budget. Our hospital bags are packed, I’m about to hit 37 weeks in my pregnancy, and we still haven’t fully put together the bedside nursery. We don’t even have a changing station, and I’m not sure if the disposable diapers I was gifted are going to be the right size. I’ll have to learn how to use the fabric ones I’m also being gifted, and I’m terrified of coming across as ungrateful as I deal with the mental stress of learning how to care for an infant for the first time considering how many baby supplies we got for free.
I told my remote job that I’ll need two weeks of light work around the 9th of March so I can deal with giving birth…and I’m scared that will turn into a month of no paycheck, and no mental space to rejuggle our finances to accommodate. I want the option to keep earning money if I can, since hubs is taking advantage of the best paid family leave any US resident has ever experienced to date - a total of four months paid leave over the course of this year.
Well… mostly paid leave. One month of full pay, three at significantly reduced pay…which we might just barely manage to make work, as long as we don’t have any unexpected costs. And piles and piles of paperwork to fill out in order to get those benefits, and hours of troubleshooting confusing documents in the mail “rejecting” the request to take leave because we don’t have a birth certificate for our unborn child yet…even when the documentation needs to be submitted 30 days in advance.
Here’s where we’re at right now.
All in all we’re continuing with our daily grind, and still (call us crazy) carving out time and conjuring dollars out of thin wallets to work on our passion projects - the activities that make us feel like ourselves so deeply that we’ve both sobbed on days when we’re too mentally or physically depleted to participate in them. Even though right now in this “season” none of those activities are arguably justified, and the stress of caring for those dreams makes us even more anxious than the idea of maintaining the daily grind while learning to be new parents.
We’re still eating the elephant one bite at a time, even though it seems like the elephant just keeps growing the more we eat. And I’m writing this blog even though I have nightmares of reading this post a year from now feeling even further inundated and behind, or worse yet, having nothing to show for the whole year’s passing.
And if you’re in a place where you’re about to loose your home or your car because of debt, or you if your kids say they hate you every day and you drink to forget that once they’re in the beds you found for them off a no-buy facebook group, or if you have a comfortable life and your crushing depression is totally “unjustified because other people have it so much harder”:
I relate more to where you are than any influencer - even the ones living my “dream” life.
And your stories are the ones that make my insane dreams feel justified and worthwhile.
