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…
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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.
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.
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….
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 things can be true.
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.
If you would like additional support with this and you live in California or Florida, please feel free to reach out to me directly to explore therapy together. You can also book a complimentary consult call to explore therapy with one of my fantastic clinicians at my trauma-informed therapy center, Evergreen Counseling.
Or if you live outside of these states, please consider enrolling in the waitlist for the Relational Trauma Recovery School – or my signature online course, Hard Families, Good Boundaries, designed to support you in healing your adverse early beginnings and create a beautiful adulthood for yourself, no matter where you started out in life.
And until next time, please take very good care of yourself. You’re so worth it.
Warmly, Annie
Dear Annie, that’s how my life feels right now !!! I have no one to talk about it. Thank you so much for your help !!
Hi Mari,
I’m so glad this post spoke to you and I hope that it brought you some small amount of comfort.
I’m sending you my very best.
Warmly, Annie
Hey Annie,
you have no idea how much I needed this at this time.
I am under counseling and life seems so hard to me.
your posts inspire me and I always appreciate you for that.
I have a borderline personality disorder. I would love if you can write something about that someday. Just a general request.
Thanks
Hi Apoorva,
I’m so glad my words resonated with you and I hope that they gave you some small bit of comfort. I will certainly be writing articles about borderline personality disorder in the future and actually have an article about this scheduled for later this year.
I’m wishing you all my best and hope that you take good care of yourself. Warmly, Annie
Dear Annie, I’ve found this when I really needed it. But I already know I need to bookmark it for when I need it next.
I’ve started getting sudden thoughts, often, of: Is it worth it? This is too tough. I can’t handle it.
I’ve become estranged with my two sisters, and partially my mother as well. Because they do not support my choice of partner. We also live very close. And I am very, very close with my sisters and mother. because we share a common trauma together when our father stalked us for several years…
So it is very tough and it all feels surreal.
Do you have any tips for finding info? because, I can hardly find anything on estrangement with family, and siblings. i’ts really not something that is commonly talked about.
( I did read, Brittle, Broken, Bent: Coping With Family Estrangement. And thank you. because that made me feel way less alone to read. )
Thank you so much for what you write.
Hi Luna, I’m so happy this resonated with you. Thank you for your honesty and vulnerability in sharing your trauma. You are brave, resilient, and you have the capacity to tolerate so much. It can feel incredibly painful and isolating when going through family estrangement, but you’re not alone. Many of my readers share similar expereinces and you have a whole community of people rooting for you! Beyond that post of mine that you’ve already read, please be sure to search my blog by selecting the filter of “childhood trauma” as that will yield many more posts about estrangement. Also, reading the comments on each of these blogs – stories shared by others going through estrangements – may help you feel less alone. I’m sending you all my very best. Warmly, Annie.
Dear Annie,
I truly have a problem thar cannot be solved. At my age, 68, there is no ” second chance”. I do pray all the time, and know I have been worthwhile, as I was in healthcare many years. Thanks for recognizing that sometimes, there are no answers.
Hi Joconna, thank you for posting a comment and sharing your thoughts. Attempts at healing and change count for a lot and I think that doing whatever you can to comfort yourself now is perfectly okay. Take such good care of yourself. Warmly, Annie.
I’m forever trying to articulate how I feel, to myself , to my partner, to my friends. And it’s tough, really tough. But every word here I feel, every single word x
Hi Char, I’m so pleased this post spoke to you! I know things may feel difficult right now, but please remember you’re not alone. Take such good care of yourself, you’re so worth it. Warmly, Annie
I’ve been feeling this for the last 8 years of my life. One day, 6 years ago, I gave up on my life and moved back home to kill myself. After about a year or so of building up the nerve to do it, my younger cousin committed suicide and I was ‘shown’ the aftermath of it all. Needless to say, couldn’t pull through with it so I’ve been sitting and just.. waiting for the natural inevitable. I had moments through my last 6 years where I could muster up some energy to feel motivated but it never really lasted or pushed me in any real direction. In the last bit of 2020 I discovered I have an interest and knack for neuroscience and anatomy because I seem to just get it; my long episodes of a unfocused and a unmindful mind sorta sparked my interest in my own life. Sadly, I find myself thinking unrealistically because I cannot expect to go to medical school when I walked through my life unconscious. Nope, this is just a dream and I hope I can find a way to wake up.
Hi,
Thank you for your comment and for your vulnerability in sharing your story. I am sorry to hear about your younger cousin and that you have struggled with similar feelings. I’d like to encourage you to seek support for not only your own feelings but working through the loss of your cousin. Having a knack for neuroscience and anatomy is a very special gift! Perhaps there are other careers that would allow you to use this gift without requiring a medical degree? I would like to encourage you to find a good trauma-informed therapist in your area who you can talk about all of this with. Psychology Today is a wonderful starting point to see who in your area might be able to be a resource.
I am sending you my very best, please take care of yourself.
Warmly, Annie
Hi Annie,
You have no idea how much your post related to me. I feel stuck and lost and needed to read your comforting words.
Hi Saania,
Thank you for your comment, I’m so very happy that this article resonated with you and that my words were a source of the comfort you so deeply deserve. I’d like to encourage you to seek support while you are feeling stuck and lost. You don’t need to struggle with these feelings by yourself.
I’d also like to invite you to continue to explore my blog where I offer free articles on everything from self-care to healing childhood trauma. I hope that you continue to find comfort in my words and know that you are not alone.
Please take such good care of yourself, you are so worth it.
Warmly, Annie
Thanks for this letter Annie. I felt every word you said. It really is hard, sometimes I feel like I just want to end my life or just run into the woods and live like a hermit or something. Well, anyway thanks again.
Hi JP,
Thank you so much for reaching out. I know life can sometimes feel impossible but please know this, you are worthy of a wonderful life and the world needs you. I hope this letter gave you some of the comfort you so richly deserve, please read it anytime life feels overwhelming and know that I’m truly sending you my very best.
Warmly, Annie
hi I know im late but this post meant the world to me. So many things you said here i’ve never heard another person say and it feels nice to know others are feeling the same. Life is hard enough but life with depression or any mental illness can be absolutely debilitating. What got me most was when you said something along the lines of when you think life couldnt get worse then it does. ive felt this way for the last 15 years. every year I think it couldn’t possibly get worse and what I would do to go back the year pryor cause compared to the current year its not so bad. I dont know how I got here mentally but im glad im not alone. Thank you so much for posting this. Its nice to know that there are people with the ability to help others and do so without any strings attached. not sure how long it took for you to write this but you definitely helped me in this very moment. Thank you so very much
This post is 5 years old now, but it is new to me, and I just wanted to say: thank you! from an exhausted and overwhelmed first time mum in Manchester, UK.
You’ve hit the nail on the head!
So many points, hit home that I have thought & my mind so convoluted with I shouldn’t think or do that so I do nothing
thank you for this article
Pamela J Smith
heyAnnie! I found this post because I have just been feeling hopeless recently. I don’t have any idea what my life is going to be. it seems like everyone my age already has a plan, but I’ve got nothing. I don’t want a big fancy life, I just want an apartment and a stable job, but it feels like that might never happen. everyone is telling me I need to get a higher education, but I know I’d regret it if I did. this post helped ground me, remind me that I just need to follow that Compas inside my heart and figure things out for myself. Thank you!
Annie,
This encapsulates my present reality perfectly down to the smaller details. I was laid off at the beginning of the year. Had a surgery that went wrong in June. Dad was very recently hospitalized and almost died. Car wreck two days after (not at fault).
I still haven’t been able to land a position and I’m down to the last of my savings. My ability to cope with reality has been stretched to its maximum, but reading this made me realize that the way I’ve been processing all of this is entirely normal and many people go through it, especially in time of extreme adversity. This is definitely joining my other bookmarks. Thanks Annie.