Life is Like This

Slowly but surely, I keep learning that a life well lived doesn't mean everything goes smoothly.

Photo by Everett Pachmann on Unsplash

Monday morning

I’m waiting for a text or a phone call to schedule an AC repair appointment. It’s 84 degrees in the house right now. I am sweating just typing this lol.

Part of my brain is saying WHY?!? I just got home from being gone for a whole week, Saturday to Saturday, why now? Why can’t I just get home, have a normal few days before things start going sideways? This doesn’t seem fair. Doesn’t the AC know I was gone for a week and I just need to be able to get up and do my regular routine? Why doesn’t the universe care about meeeee it’s not fair…

Another part of my brain is chuckling as I resist reality:

Oh Amy, it’s saying. You know life is like this. It’s not you, it just is.

My co-dependency flares up- I don’t want to inconvenience anyone, is there any way I can fix this and not have to bother anyone? I change the battery in the thermostat. Check the fuse box. Turn the AC off, then on a few times. Stare out the window at the AC thing. Nothing changes.

Also part of my brain is telling me that if something breaks my landlady will ask me to move out, because that happened to me once before, almost ten years ago.

It takes thirty minutes of debating with myself, but I finally text my landlady at 9pm and let her know what’s up. I wait thirty minutes for her to respond, she doesn’t, so I go to bed.

In the morning, I see my landlady’s text from after I went to bed. She apologizes and recommends a couple AC repair places to call. I submit an online service request to one company, then call the other, then that is difficult because I rent my house and they have to have approval from the homeowner to come out to service the AC, but it’s 6am and I don’t know if my landlady is awake yet. So I tell the person not to call her yet, and then text her to let her know what’s up at 6:30am. She gets back to me at 7am.

It turns out that her mom is in hospice care and is actively dying, not a great time for the AC to go out at your tenant’s house. My co-dependency rears up again. Why am I creating problems when her mom is dying? I reign myself in, talking to myself in my 53 year old voice instead of my 13 year old one- I haven’t done something wrong, I don’t need to scramble for cover. I text her. I’m sorry to hear about your mom, please let me know how I can make the AC situation easier.

Wednesday midday

The AC tech got the system working Monday afternoon, but also said it needs to be replaced. I’ve had AC back since then, thank goodness, Monday and Tuesday were cooler here in Durham, NC- but the rest of the week is sweltering again. Yesterday I had a day full of meetings and clients and luckily the second opinion AC person from a different company arrived in an open window of my time, but then I had to hop on with a client so I don’t know what he found.

This morning my landlady texted me that her mom died yesterday. I felt so foolish worrying about my AC when her mom was dying, and also life is like that. It’s such a mind bender to think about me trying to juggle clients and AC techs while she is dealing with her mom literally dying at the exact same time.

Before I would have felt so ashamed, and selfish. I would have been so harsh with myself, even though logically I knew that being mean to me didn’t make sense. I would have worked myself into a mental lather.

Instead, I let it in. I let the bad timing be bad timing. I identified my feelings and was with them, acknowledging all of us, and the different ways we experienced the last few days. I didn’t hide, or try to be overly agreeable. I showed up for me, and for her too.

If there’s any one secret to recovery for me it’s this: Life is like this. It is all the things- ups and downs, fronts and backs, sideways. A compass of experiences that is random and not out to get me. I spent so much time in the past trying to make life smooth, feeling like I was doing something wrong when it wasn’t, believing that a good life is a life with no complications or struggle. That once things settle down, then I’ll be fine.

That wish for smooth only is control, and control is the opposite of trust.

Life is like this- it’s delayed flights, broken AC the day after you get back from a week long vacation, complicating your landlady’s life with your broken AC because her mom is on the verge of dying. It’s not things going smoothly that builds our trust in each other and ourselves- it’s how we show up when life is itself.

A successful life = things going smoothly doesn’t add up. Life is just life-ing. I am not owed anything. Life will hand me things long after my hands are full- things that are good, bad, and inbetween. Things going wrong or getting messed up or breaking or people dying isn’t something to avoid. It’s life. And by being there for all of it, I am living.