If you haven’t figured it out yet, life is f*cking hard. Like, I’m talking fully erect penis hard. Sorry, Grandma. I make dick jokes when I’m frustrated. I’m working on it. Sort of.
I’ve always found it a little funny how humans take such pride in being the most complicated animal. Oh, we’re so evolved! We’re the top of the food chain! Woop-dee-doo. Some days, I’d trade in all this emotional intelligence to be a cow just grazing along. Happy. Content. Not crippled by anxiety. Totally unaware that I’m about to become someone’s dinner.
Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to get bleak so fast. I don’t know, maybe it’s easy to get bleak these days. I don’t think it’s that more terrible things happen now, but with technology, we can’t easily avoid those punches to the gut. Everything is stuffed down our throats. We can’t escape the stories that sink our hearts, the stories that make us want to crawl under the covers and never come back out.
It’s easy to get lost in just how difficult this world can be.
I’m always reminded of a particular quote by Buffy (aka my favorite character from any TV show, ever) when she’s speaking to her sister Dawn: “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” Because damn Buffy, you’re right. It is. It really, really is.
When I sat down to write this, I thought, “Surely a beautiful epiphany is going to hit me!” I was ready to let my fingers click and clack, work away until I typed my way into the answer. Some simple way to make the dark times brighter, the hurt a little less painful. Something I can hold up and show everyone else, “This is it! Life isn’t going to be hard anymore!”
But, shocker, none of that happened. I am no closer to unlocking the secrets to the universe than I was an hour ago. Or a day ago. Or hell, a year ago. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe Buffy was right and together, we find our ways to survive.
There’s a strange solace I find when things get really tough – I’m talking when my fists are held up to the sky and I’m cursing it all – and it’s the notion that as alone as we may feel, life is hard for everyone. We all have our days of tremendous strife. We all have our nights of questioning when tomorrow will actually be better. Everyone struggles. Everyone fights to make it through. Isn’t that something? As hard as life is, we keep fighting to make it through. Maybe there’s a silver lining in there somewhere. I don’t know. Right now, I’m too tired to find it. Let me know if you do. I’d love to hear about it. I’d love to know. 
