We're all just walking each other home

My mother’s puppy, Tessa, at the pool many years ago.

Last week, I was having breakfast with two good friends.

All three of us are going through a lot right now.

Family issues, health issues, job issues. Not to mention the insane state of the world right now.

A lot.

Sometimes it feels so overwhelming, it takes my breath away.

But for an hour, we put all that aside. And we just talked about silly stuff. Pop culture, and jokes, and weird historical facts we know. And we ate bacon and eggs.

Amazing bacon. Bacon is just one of those miracles of life, isn’t it?

Did you know that Lindsay Wagner won an Emmy for playing both Jaime Sommers – the Bionic Woman – and Jaime’s evil twin, Lisa Galloway? She did.

Did you know that one of the figures most influential in getting the original Star Trek on the air was Lucille Ball? She was.

I felt so much better after that hour.

In the last three years, in addition to having both a brain tumor and a stroke, I have faced a soul-crushing amount of rejection - more than I have experienced in the whole rest of my life so far.

It wears you down. It makes you feel worthless.

And one of the things I have learned in this incredibly hard period is that one of the few things that makes all this survivable are my family and friends.

“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
-Contact

This newsletter isn’t about me. It’s about you. I have struggled with how to write about mental health in this context. I’m not a therapist or a counselor, and I haven’t found many people who can add usefully to this topic. But job hunting is one of the most stressful endeavors we can go through in this life. And I want to talk about that, even if I’m not exactly sure how.

All that I really want to say this week is that no matter how hard things get, there are always people out there who love you; people who want to support you and see you succeed.

Seek them out. Stay in contact. Don’t retract. Don’t hide. That’s the worst thing you can do, even if it feels like the easiest path in the moment.

You can also be that support for someone else. Just stay open to that.

“Everbody’s got a sack of rocks.” -Elaine Stritch

Spend an hour with a friend, someone you’ve known for years. Don’t talk about your job, or your job search, or your latest doctor’s appointment. Talk about when you used to make Super 8 movies in your backyard together. Talk about your mother’s amazing pot roast recipe.

Or talk about that episode of “The Bionic Woman” where the fembots attacked, until someone ripped their faces off to reveal weird staring eyes and a speaker where the mouth would be.

Just an idea.

See you next week!