A compass wildly spinning

 The past few weeks have left me reeling. I know I'm not the only one.

What should look like this:

Is looking and feeling like this:

I am falling, and trying like hell to get back up again. Until the next gutpunch.

"Mercury is in retrograde" people say, as if that would really explain the hellfire and damnation that has rained down.

When you are just taking one hit after another - when everything seems to pile up and pile on and spill over - all of the OTHER stuff, the regular day to day stuff, and the things you committed to forever ago, and the things that are important to you, or to people you love, suddenly become part of the burden. And that can make a girl ornery.

I learned this lesson recently, when people were asking me perfectly legitimate questions at a time when I was feeling physically, spiritually and emotionally overwhelmed. Instead of just answering their damn questions, or simply saying "I honestly don't know" I had to spend a great deal of time talking myself down from responding to their laundry list of woes, with a list of my own.

Tit for tat. (Says the girl with the tat on her tit.)

Deep breath.

Right. They're busy. Or at least, they think they are busy. Maybe they are busy in relation to their  normal life of navel gazing.

My point is this:

Everyone is busy.

Everyone's life sucks at some point.

Everyone is over-committed, under-funded and out of time.

"Until you've walked a mile in my shoes, you can't judge me."

Well, I'm calling bullshit on that. Because unless you are wearing some really hot shoes in a size 10 1/2 (which is practically impossible to find, BTW) I have no interest in wearing your shoes.

Never mind walking a mile in them.

Stop with the excuses already. Put on your own damn shoes, and start walking.

And if you are assuming that you are busier or more stressed out or more heartbroken or somehow more important than the next guy, well. You would be wrong. To behave as though you deserve priority, that you are above the rules or somehow excused from following them......that just makes it easier for people to dismiss you as a self-centered ass. Even if you are currently the ass featured in your own private game of pin the tail on the donkey.

I am watching families come undone, and slowly finding a way to come back together again. A new kind of together, they hold their compass facing north and the compass swings wildly, as their North Star suddenly heads due South. And all I can think, as the waves of remembering lead to a terrible, painful, breathless sadness, is keep your eye on the horizon.

And even with that life and death reality slapping me repeatedly in the face, I am looking around and seeing more examples of pain - different, but just as terrible - all around. And I am realizing.

Life is full of hard lessons and painful experiences and NO ONE will be spared.

So. Lesson learned, and lets move forward acknowledging that everyone's reality may be different in the details, but the load is equally hard to bear at times.

Buck up, Buttercup. We're in this together.