Relentless Podcast, Episode 2: I’m not okay right now.

This Undone Life Together with Michele Cushatt

How many times have you heard the words fall from your mouth? “…I’m fine.”

Even just today? As the crack splinters a little further through the chambers of your breaking heart, threatening its very foundation. As the next breath threatens not to come.

As the husband walks out, the roommate makes yet another passive aggressive remark, the child slams the door, the unpaid bills pile up on the counter, the elderly parent grows weaker…

“I’m fine. It’s fine. We’re fine.”

It was a typical Tuesday morning. I woke up, ran a quick 4 miles, and spent time reading my Bible, praying, and journaling. As the day progressed, I ate mostly veggies, drank lots of water, avoided sugar and limited my red meat intake. I was “killing it,” no pun intended, in all regards. The session with my Christian counselor seemed especially productive, and even though I had gifted my body with an afternoon nap earlier in the day, I now laid my head on the pillow in time to get a casual 8-10 hours of sleep for the night.

By all observable accounts, it had been a successful day… but the truth was I was crumbling from the inside out. Here I was, doing everything within my power to keep my head above water, the picture of health; while simultaneously, I was at my absolute lowest moment.

“I was doing all the right things, and even then, even there, in spite of all that effort, I was continuing to sink.”

Worse yet, despite my family and friends’ attempts to comfort and support me, I felt completely alone in my suffering. Years of consecutive trauma and loss had now accumulated as this searing pain in my chest, an invisible phantom that tormented my insides, plaguing me with heartache and a resulting isolation.

“This is what almost took me under. It wasn’t cancer, it wasn’t even the pain, but the fear that I was completely alone in it.”

Now, this is important: It’s easy to look at someone in pain and wonder what they did to deserve exactly what they got. We love to suspect the victim as secretly complicit-to and therefore guilty-of whatever perceived failure we blame for their plight. It’s embarrassingly easy to unknowingly attack our own wounded.

“Sometimes we like to blame people for their pain. Sometimes we want to point a finger at something that somebody is doing to cause their own situation. Because if we can point a finger and we can find a reason or a cause-effect relationship between their suffering & what they’re doing or not doing, then we think we can avoid it ourselves.”

In a world where many of us are already living with the shame and disappointment of dashed dreams and it-wasn’t-supposed-to-be-this-ways, we have a choice to make. We can rush to judgment and blame, sighing about how that one friend should just get over it already, effectively leaving her even more alone. Or, we can move toward one another in humility, recognizing that to add to someone’s isolation is to consequently add to their suffering.

“There is a suffering that happens at times that is beyond a person’s ability to bootstrap themselves through it.”

So I’ve compiled a list of my own, personal strategies for moving through those days that hang heavy with the weight of it all. Listed below you will discover tangible ways to respond to your own personal suffering, or to support a loved one. My prayer is that these strategies help fight the fissures that form between us as we journey down this long, sometimes grueling, road together.

Sweet friend, you are not alone. There is a way of life that is better than ‘fine,’ but we cannot do it on our own. Eventually, if we pull on them hard enough and for long enough, even the strongest of bootstraps break.