I am sad and anxious. It will pass and I will be fine but sometimes it helps to write it out and say it out loud. It is what it is. My sleep has been off the last week or so which is always a dead giveaway that my anxiety isn’t being managed well. Sadness usually follows and here we are.

I am grateful for everything I have: a roof over my head, no worries about where my meals will come from, a job that pays well, good family relationships and a solid partnership with M, friendships that have carried me through rough times and continue to thrive despite life changes and a fucking pandemic. I have the privilege of a white middle class woman. And despite all that I am thankful for, life is fucking hard.

Watching our president and country fight against equality and equity and even acknowledging that there is a problem breaks my goddamn heart. Seeing people murdered in the streets for nothing but living. Seeing people murdered for peacefully protesting. Watching our country slip further into a dictatorship and fascism. It is a hard truth to look at day in and day out. Watching people fall ill and die when COVID could have been slowed and we could have flattened the curve. And then there is the personal.

The guilt I feel for still having a job. The guilt I feel for being fortunate to live in a state and city that takes public health seriously. Missing the family I cannot see. Missing the friends I saw this weekend for the first time in 6 months even more than I did before our visit. Meeting a dear friends baby girl for the first time and she’s already 6 months old. I feel so keenly the things we are all missing, all of the things and people and places. And then there is my health, which is never wonderful but stable enough for me to keep working at least. On Thursday I’ll be having surgery in an attempt to ease the pain I am in so frequently. I hope it works. It’s routine and I’m not worried about the procedure itself, but of the possibility that it will be yet another thing I’ve tried that hasn’t helped as much as I (and my doctors) hope. I hope it works.

Please let it work. I just want to feel better.