But I am really struggling.

dh looked at me yesterday and said “you are broken, and I don’t know how to fix you.”

and I said “I know. I don’t know either.”

And he asked “what is breaking you?”

to which I replied “top of the list today? I’m living in a world where children want to die.”

He tried to say he thought nothing had changed, that it is just “media awareness” and I listed by name the six young people in my life who have attempted to take their lives in the last 8 months. Two succeeded. One is in the hospital. Two are in residential facilities.

he said “it has been a bad year.”

I wake up every day and I feel like the world is burning and I don’t know what to do. Every action I can take seems so small and meaningless. And yet, I do not have the strength, connections, power, for big, dramatic actions. I can’t find anything I could do that I feel like would make a difference. I try to focus on the tasks in front of me. But it is overwhelming.

my grandfather was a surgeon. When I asked him what he did in the war he said “patch up broken boys so they could go back and die.” He drank himself to death.

i cry a lot.

i don’t know how people who care just keep going. I see the light in the world, but somehow it just makes the blackness more dark.

my daughter is going to have a baby and I am happy and excited and I haven’t even told one if my best friends because we raised our kids together and her son is awaiting trial for murder and holding those two things in my heart at the same time is agonizing and I can’t imagine how it would feel to her.

what do you do? How do you make it enough? How do you make it stop hurting and if you don’t, how do you live like a normal person anyway?

i am great in the classroom. I am good at the pottery studio. And at home, I have nothing left.