Rough weekend
This was a rough weekend. I was at work for most of it, and we have sick clients, burned out staff, and the two are a brutal combination. Staff had little patience and clients wanted to be taken care of and left alone at the same time. They also had a lot of…well, you’ve been around sick people.
They are messy.
And not in a “left their socks in the living room” kind of messy.
I am also dealing with our busiest time at the full time job, sleeping away from home most every night and normal life stresses, so while I tried pretty hard to have patience with the clients, when they staff would start to lose patience, I didn’t have it in me to confront them. Instead, I would just step in and help the client back to their room, clean up the bathroom AGAIN or find things to help people calm down. It took a lot out of me, so by the time I got home yesterday at 3 pm (and I’d been at work since 9 pm the night before) I just didn’t want to do anything.
The thought in my head after hearing the news headlines was “I give up.”
Part of it is how tired I was. Part of it was my lack of a personal life. Part of it was how little energy I have. Part of it was how my emotional checkbook is empty. Part of it is how I look at the state of things and feel like the selfish, the cruel, the violent….the monsters are winning.
Another mass shooting, and the exact same people who screamed that the perp in the Halloween attack in NYC needed to be shipped to Gitmo, and we needed to bar anyone from coming to the US minutes after that happened are the ones saying it’s too soon to say ANYTHING after yet another mass shooting with an AR-15.
Yeah, I say all the time that a lot of life is how you look at it and back when I decided to change my mindset, I said that I was going to do that. Some days it’s easy. Some, it’s not. Some days I have no problem with thinking the best of people and knowing that I have people in my life who care for me. That the things I do to make things a little better than I left them is working.
Some days, though, some days it’s hard.
Some days, I’ll say that it’s just a ride, that we can change the world, that people can eventually be their best selves.
Some days, I just say in my head “I give up.” And there’s no one close to me in my life to talk me out of it.
So. Today?
I give up.
I’ll go to work. I’ll write. I’ll be kind to the people who cross my path. Anything else?
I give up. Life may just be a ride, but I’m tired of people turning the lights out on it.
I give up.
