This Way Down

I really wanted this year to be different. I wanted to shake off everything bad from last year and walk into January on a surer footing. That didn’t happen and I get the sneaking suspicion we are all being led forcibly down to hell. Quickly.

I ran through so many year end posts about the bright side of things that I wondered if I was broken somehow. Could I not see the good in my own life? I tallied my own year - one filled with illness and death and hardship on top of the embarrassment that comes from being an American in today’s world and I realized that the year demanded an awful lot of us and maybe I could be forgiven for lapses and bumps and the lack of cheeriness. Could others not see how brightly the dumpster burned? That is a question I’ve been asking for a decade, now, and still do not have a satisfactory answer.

And then I read an article detailing how you should drop any and all people from your life if they complain too much or something bad is always happening to them or they are (gasp!) pessimistic in nature. It was really hard not to feel targeted by these words - they were describing me, after all, I’m an admitted pessimist - though I do love to say I’m a realist instead - but it still dinged my sensibilities a bit. Am I a drag to be around?

Years ago, nearly 20, now, I knew someone who told me that I would never be a good writer because what I wrote was “too sad”. She detailed how she only wanted friends who were happy and my chosen profession put me squarely on the outs. No sadness was allowed around her at all. I don’t find myself as an overly sad person, really, so it was shocking to hear her pronouncement. I moved from the friendship easily, but her words stuck. Not as any sort of rebuke to myself, but as a how would she sustain relationships with such strict rules? Everyone is sad sometimes. Would she make exceptions for others and this was a convenient tool to level? I don’t know and sometimes wish I had a way to check and see where that put her now.

That our world is the most unserious right now is not really up for debate, as far as I’m concerned. I actually don’t really trust anyone who says otherwise or acts as if all is normal. But I know there is more to it. I keep thinking of all the people who laughed and loved through darker times and if we’ve just been led to believe that was the norm. I’m sure there were those who just could not find the joy through the day to day battles. Why are the ones who did heralded and those that didn’t are lost to time? I don’t know. My faith tradition, those I look up to all say that we can find peace and joy in the hardest of times. And I wonder again if I’m really the outlier that can’t.

I know this year can turn around. Maybe. I’m having a tough time seeing that it will. The arrows, pointing down, are saying daily to me, this is it and we’re only going lower. And where is the peace in that?