When Life Feels Impossible: A Note for the Hard Days
There are seasons when responsibilities, regret, fear, and exhaustion make it difficult to imagine a way through the next hour. This essay does not offer false certainty. It offers permission to feel what is here, to reach for the supports that help, and to take hard days in the smallest possible increments.
When Everything Feels Too Heavy
When life feels impossible…
When life feels impossible, you may want to give up.
On your job, your kid, your partner, your life. You may want to run away to a corner of the world where no one will find you, where you can start over, where you can be free of the crushing weight of responsibilities you hold.
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Mongolia sounds nice , who would find you in Mongolia? Or becoming a waitress in a diner with a rented apartment and no one and nothing to take care of…
When life feels impossible you may regret , deeply regret , big choices you’ve made that are now irrevocable (or seem that way).
You may grieve the choices you’ve made and all the paths that seem unavailable to you now. That person, that career, that down payment, that would-have-been child…
When life feels impossible you may wake up at 3am, content in sleep and then when your mind gains a shred of consciousness, your brain grabs hold of thoughts like a needle on a record player and starts whirling and remembering… zooming you out of the peace you felt while asleep and unconscious and spiraling you into anxiety for the rest of the sleepless morning…
When life feels impossible you may cry five times before 8am and apply multiple coats of undereye concealer to hide the puffiness before heading into work. And you wonder how on earth you’re going to get through the work day.
You rival the talents of Meryl Streep in acting OK just to get through the day. You watch the clock and think it will never reach 5pm…
When life feels impossible, you think your body , your stomach, your chest, your throat , can’t possibly hold any more of the hot heat of emotion you are feeling.
The essay describes a state in which responsibilities, regret, fear, and strong emotion can make the body and mind feel as if they cannot hold any more.
In plain terms: When everything feels like too much, struggling to plan or think clearly is a sign that you need care, not proof that you are failing.
You may wonder how you thought things were hard before when they feel so much more vividly difficult and high stakes now…
When life feels impossible you may wonder how on earth your life got so terribly off track. You may think to yourself, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way for me!”
You may think back on all the choice points you could have taken that might have led you to more stable finances, a happier marriage, a healthier body.
You look at your old college classmates on Instagram and regret that you didn’t go into finance, you didn’t stay with that guy from your dorm, that you didn’t join that then-little-known startup that became Facebook…
When life feels impossible you may find yourself watching The Handmaid’s Tale or Game of Thrones to reassure yourself that your life, while hard as hell right now, could hypothetically be worse…
When life feels impossible, you may look at other people , in your office, in their cars next to yours on the commute , and wonder if they have it easier. No, you KNOW they have it easier. And you feel jealous and sad and angry about your own situation and having it so much harder…
When life feels impossible, people may say to you, “You’ll get through it. You’ll figure it out.”
And you think to yourself, what the hell does that mean? And yeah, I’ll figure it out because I have no choice but to figure it out and yet you still don’t know what that will look like…
When life feels impossible all you may want in the world is to crawl under your blankets and dissociate through escapist TV, reading, or sleep.
Dissociation is a protective way of disconnecting from thoughts, feelings, or present experience when they feel too hard to bear.
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In plain terms: Wanting to disappear into sleep, television, or reading can be your mind’s attempt to get distance from pain for a while.
Being awake, being in touch with the reality of your life feels too hard…
When life feels impossible, you may feel like things will never get better.
You’re convinced things will always be this hard and painful and that you may have blown up your life with a choice you made, something you said, or something you didn’t do or say. You may feel like this is now your new normal. A permanent state…
When life feels impossible, people can say to you, “I get it. I’ve been there. Things get better. Things will get better for you.”
But you don’t really believe them. Or you want a timeline and a tactical plan for HOW and WHEN so you can have some hope…
When life feels impossible, you long to reach out to friends, to people who will understand, but maybe you don’t have these people. Or you can’t bring up what you want to talk about. Or it’s not emotionally safe to talk about it with people in your life.
And even if you do reach out, if doesn’t feel like enough. And you’re afraid of exhausting your loved ones with your emotional needs…
When life feels impossible, everything can feel like too much. Like this human experience is just crushingly hard. Like this isn’t what you signed up for. Like you don’t know how you’re going to get through this….
What You’re Allowed to Feel
And I want to tell you something…
If you’re feeling this way right now, you’re not alone. I know what this feels like for myself, and I see it with my friends, with my little family, with my clients and with my colleagues.
To feel this way is such a human experience. It’s pure, raw, unadulterated, broken, fractured humanness.
Reading these words likely won’t make you feel any better, and that’s not necessarily my intent, anyways.
I want you to feel comforted and I want to tell you that things will get better and you can handle it. But I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t honestly know if that will be true.
I don’t know if things will, in fact, get harder for you. Or harder before they get better. And I don’t know how things will resolve for you, if they will resolve, and what the timeline and how of that resolution might be.
I want so badly to be able to say to you, it will be okay. And perhaps it will be. But it also probably hurts like hell right now and I want to let you know it’s okay to feel this way.
It’s okay to regret your life choices. It’s okay to want to quit your life, your kids, your marriage, your responsibilities. It’s okay to compare yourself to others you see walking past you, or on your Instagram feed.
It’s okay to hate your life circumstances right now. It’s okay to cry more than you smile today. It’s okay to feel like you’re just barely surviving and not thriving like you thought you would/should be when you got [fill in the blank].
It’s okay that you’re going through this and it also sucks and hurts like hell at the same time.
Both/And: Support Can Look Different
Both things can be true.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
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Five Minutes at a Time
In times like these, we have no choice but to dig deep, to turn towards any support we can.
And sometimes those supports look like therapy and yoga and meditation.
And sometimes they look like Zoloft, Netflix binges, and popcorn for dinner every night of the week.
Sometimes emotional support looks like turning towards your best friends and booking an extra session with your therapist.
And sometimes it looks like Googling all night and finding blog posts and forum threads from strangers who have gone through something similar. Leaving you less alone.
Sometimes it just looks like going to sleep. Letting yourself have ten solid hours of sleep where you can get a break from reality.
Sometimes it looks like Marco Poloing your best girlfriends twice. Three times. Four times in one day. Just to hear their voices. Just to see their faces and to feel okay.
Whatever your version of digging deep is, let that be okay.
Take care of yourself in any way you need to to get through a particularly tough time.
Try and remember the tough times you’ve survived before and how, in the middle of them, they felt endless and also impossible and they, too, passed.
Try to remember you have a history of surviving tough times and let this be a sliver of consolation about the current tough time you find yourself in.
When life feels impossible, the last thing you want to do is beat yourself up for not coping with it better.
Do what you need to right now, honey.
There’s not one single prescription for self-care. Let whatever comforts you right now be okay and keep putting one foot in front of the other until your tough time is a ghost of a memory.
When life feels impossible, bookmark this post, come back to it when you need a digital proverbial permission slip to take care of yourself, and then keep taking things five minutes at a time.
Seek out the helpers that resonate with you, take the pieces of advice that work and leave the rest, trust the process and imagine that this will pass.
I care about you.
Q: What do I do when life feels impossible?
A: The essay suggests starting with what gets you through the immediate stretch: support, rest, therapy, medication when appropriate, friends, or small comforts.
Q: Is it wrong to regret my choices?
A: No. The essay explicitly gives permission to feel regret, anger, grief, jealousy, and exhaustion without adding judgment.
Q: Why do I wake up anxious at 3am?
A: The essay describes how a waking mind can latch onto fear and unfinished concerns. It does not mean you have failed at coping.
Q: What if I cannot believe things will get better?
A: You do not have to force certainty. The essay encourages remembering past hard periods you survived and taking the present in small increments.
Q: Is Netflix or sleep ever self-care?
A: The essay holds that support can look different in a hard season. Sometimes rest or a temporary escape is what helps you make it through.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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