We are all trying here

Do you look at certain people and feel tired from watching someone else's life and start to feel like your own life does not measure up?

You would look at them and feel behind like everyone had received some divine instructions on how to make their life somehow better or how to live life correctly and somehow somewhere you missed it.

Now you're here thinking you are the only one fumbling around trying to find it in the dark.

Lol. In case you are not aware, they are fumbling too. Everything you see, or you hear is not how it exactly is.

We are all, every single one of us, trying to figure out the same things. How to be loved without losing ourselves, how to want things without letting the wanting consume us, how to show up for the people who matter when we can barely show up for ourselves, how to keep going on the days when keeping going feels like the hardest thing anyone has ever asked of us and the list goes on and on and on.

We just do it quietly, behind closed doors, in the middle of the night, in conversations we have only with ourselves and then we walk back out into the world looking like we have zero life problems and worries.

We are hard on ourselves in a way that we would never be on anyone we truly truly loved. If a friend called you and said they don't know what they're doing and that they feel behind or thought they'd be further in life than they are now and they're scared because it is like they're running out of time.

You wouldn't honestly tell them the truth even if that is what it truly seems. You would somehow want to encourage them and ensure whatever you're telling them comes from a place of love.

You would let them know they're doing better than they think. You would honestly let them know how nobody has it figured out and the ones who look like they do are just more quiet about how confused they are.

You would be kind with your response and then you would hang up the phone and return to being ruthless with yourself. You can imagine.

Like the grace you give so freely to everyone else is somehow not available to give yourself. Very funny and omo, it's exhausting.

Trying looks different on everybody and that is the part we forget. For some people trying looks like just getting out of bed when they are tired.

For some people trying looks like staying in those annoyingly hard conversation instead of going quiet, staying in that city, or staying in that job even when it feels uncertain.

For some people trying looks like leaving which takes just as much as staying does, sometimes even more.

For some people trying looks like being in a room full of people and not letting anyone see that inside of you, you're ruined, you are broken or so tired.

Most of these come unnoticed but it's still trying and it still counts.

I want us to be gentle with each other but not in a way that excuse rubbish please abeg. Most of us are loving people with the same love we were shown. Most of us are protecting ourselves from the same things that once broke us while most of us are doing the best we can with what we were given and what we were given was not enough, so we just have to keep trying and trying and trying.