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If You’re Overwhelmed Right Now

I don’t know you but I think I know some things about you.

I think you’re exhausted right now.
I think you find it hard to fall asleep; worrying what might happen if you do, the monsters you imagine may run amok overnight.
I think you wake up in the morning, and the first thing you feel is a thick dread for the coming day and the brand new terrors surely awaiting you.
I think you fear for people you love deeply; those who give your ordinary days meaning, those who are close enough to touch and who you know are threatened and frightened.
I think you fear for strangers far off in the distance; those whose faces and names you’ll never know and yet whose suffering you still fully grieve.
I think you look at your children across the room and that you mourn the world they’re walking into, that you expend so much energy trying to shield them from the kind of nightmares that they shouldn’t ever have to face in the light of day.
I think you feel the very bedrock of the things you used to stand upon shaking violently in these moments; once elemental truths about country, about God, about the goodness of people and the future of the planet that no longer seem as true.
I think you wear the crippling fatigue of these days in the ever-sharpening lines around your eyes, and in the tired smile you find it more and more difficult to form.
I think you feel fully pressed against your capacity to feel or care or continue.
I think you feel like you’re attending a perpetual funeral for America.
I think you’re at the end of the last thread of your rope.

And I’d like to tell you that you’re wrong to feel these all of things.

I’d like to argue each point with you; to chip away bit by bit at the massive weight upon your shoulders, to expose your every fear as simply a mirage, as just the darkness playing tricks on you—but I can’t do that.

I can’t do that because I’m not convinced you’re at all wrong to feel these things. In fact, probably all I can do is to let you know that I think you’re likely right about all that feels not right—and that I am with you in it.

Maybe the best and only gift I can give you today is to let you know that you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. You are in good company in this plentiful misery.

Perhaps knowing that someone else feels affinity with you in all your frazzled, sickened, outraged desperation is enough to sustain you a little longer. Maybe hearing that at least one other human being is suffering in solidarity with you, is itself a comfort. Maybe these words will be enough to tether you to hope for a little while longer—and that would be a victory.

Because in times when threat comes and grief visits and sadness lingers, the greatest weapon we have is hope; the belief that somehow, in ways we can’t understand or see or make sense of—we will outlast the demons and the darkness and the very non-rightness of the present. All I can offer you is the invitation not to lose hope and pray that in accepting it, I’ll be able to keep going to.

You are not an isolated mourner. The vast majority of us are grieving as you do. Take solace in that. Find some rest and sanity in that.

I don’t know you but I think I know something about you.

I know that I’m overwhelmed along with you.

Order John’s book, ‘A Bigger Table’ here.

 

 

  

 

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