Having a father as a social worker is a blessing and a curse. I do not recall how often, but after school, he’d ask how my day was. There were good days and bad days. The fucking snowflakes of today are pussies compared to growing up in the 80s/90s. There’d be times where I’d come home from getting bullied (real bullying, not this sissy shit they say is bullying today – granted, we didn’t have social media to contend with), and I’d say the day was horrible. He’d always say, ”the day is what you make of it.” This would baffle me. How could getting spit on, punched, slapped, kicked, pushed into walls, getting constantly made fun of for being a scrawny nerd, or anything else that was negatively noteworthy be considered anything but bad? His point was always, ”someone is having a much worse day than you, so be thankful for what you have.”

Being an adult, it’s easy to forget those lessons when life kicks me square in the balls with some steel-toed alligator boots. It’s difficult to feel good about yourself when you’re behind on payments and you’ve never struggled like this before. I’ve worried about everything when there wasn’t a reason to. Imagine how worried I get when there’s actually something to worry about. There are so many things outside of my control. This inflation and recession (since they like to change the definition of things) isn’t helping. I feel worthless. I feel like a failure. There are some things that are my fault; there are some things that are not. Even remembering these lessons my father taught me, it doesn’t help much when there is a tsunami of bad news flowing at me.

I’m not the only one in this situation. I’m not the first one here, nor will I be the last one at this point. I was listening to a short Louder with Crowder episode where he was asking people if they were proud to be an American as Independence Day came around. Everyone he talked to said they were; however, there was one couple that stood out. This couple had been homeless after they both lost their jobs from the covid shutdowns. He lost his job, and his wife became homeless after her mother died. They met on the streets in Texas. With the kindness of a stranger, he moved up to Wisconsin (or another really northern state) and got a job at Tyson foods. He said that no other country provides the opportunity to go from homeless to successful in such a spectacular way. Granted, he went from successful to homeless before going from homeless to successful. This couple is black. This doesn’t matter. It only proves that skin color doesn’t matter like the media and others want us to believe. I’ve been to enough foreign countries to realize that most people in those countries are far more racist than the US.

If this couple could overcome such ”racism” and pick themselves up from disaster, why can’t I? Why can’t anyone? As corny or stereotypical as it might sound, they overcame their shit because of their belief in God. I’m not saying that the belief in God is the answer; however, we also need something positive to believe in. If we do not have anything positive to believe in, it’s hard to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. I’ve lost my job, got divorced, and sued for $250,000 all in the same year. I thought that was going to be bad enough, but this seems worse. When I get in my own head, It’s hard to escape. It’s hard to see the positive when mind is covered by dark clouds.

I’m am grateful for having someone to help pull me out of my own head. A couple of days ago, we fed off each other’s negative energy. Being empaths, we feed of the good and the bad. Mixing alcohol with the super-massive topics we were trying to discuss, it didn’t go well. I, honestly, don’t remember much about that night, but I know the aftermath was my fault. It took a day of self pity and beating myself up before I started to get out of it. Pulling yourself out of your self-inflicted bullshit isn’t easy.

One of the most difficult things is to keep things from your children, but they don’t need to know how much I’m struggling to keep up. They have their own worries. They have their own shit to deal with. If I were alone, I could understand why people give up. One way to look at this is how I should have looked at high school: in the end, it doesn’t matter what grades I get as long as I get the degree and get past it. I’ve had family go bankrupt. It’d suck ass, but it wouldn’t be the end of me. I know people who’ve lost their jobs and homes came came back stronger than ever. I could lie to myself and ”know” things will work out; however, I have people who support me, even if only emotionally, that will help me keep focus and not give up. There are aspects of my life that might suck right now, but there are other aspects that are amazing. Life is what I make of it. Sometimes, I wish I could be as oblivious and uncaring like some people I know that go bankrupt all the time. I’m not, but I know my life doesn’t suck. Sometimes, it just takes a slap in the face, both literally and figuratively, to wake my ass up and remind me of how awesome my life really is, even with hardships and uncertainty.