I've been pretty down here for the last couple of weeks. I've gone through some of the usual suspects only to find that there's no clear explanation in those. Which is a hard reality to face. When you're eating a bunch of junk, and you're feeling lethargic, it's simple. Not always easy to change, but simple to understand that you are what you eat, and junk food will give you junk feelings.
But when you have those junk feelings even though you're trying to get good sleep and exercising daily, going out in the sun, drinking lots of water, eating your fruits and veggies. That's when it's hard.
It's even harder when your partner is feeling the same way.
There's a song that I have a love-hate relationship with. I love it because it's hopeful, but I hate it because it's idealist. I love it for the priority it puts on supporting one another, but I hate it because it's never quite that simple.
I agree that there is strength in numbers and that we need to walk beside each other when one of us can't get through on our own. In theory, it's true. In practice, it sometimes is, I suppose. I can definitely think of times in my faith life, in particular, that I've needed to rely on others for encouragement because I wasn't able to pull myself out of a slump. I think this is part of the value of a faith community.
And maybe that's my problem. Not so much that I don't have anyone, but more that I don't have enough someones.
Billy has been going through some similar things with feeling down. And for all the progress that I said we've made in our disagreements, we've both had a hard time stopping mid-fight to take the others perspective here more recently. It's hard when both people in a relationship need the other person to be the bigger person.
So, here I am in California with a total of ... few friends. The ones that I have live in our last town, so seeing them has become a hit or miss of "hey I'll be down there for a doctor appointment; wanna grab lunch" kind of thing. It's been more miss, honestly.
We haven't found a church home since we moved here. There are several reasons for that, the biggest one being that it's just a lot of work. I put the work in at the first church we landed at, but it wasn't really reciprocated. Again, just a couple of relationships there. The next church I went to was a Sunday morning thing. When I tried the small group scene they had, I got the lovely insistence that there was nothing wrong with my child with special needs.
(Life pro-tip: when a child is in 15 hours of behavior therapy a week, 1 hour of emotional counseling, a special ed classroom because he is 3 grades behind in school, on medication for ADHD and self-harming behaviors, and he's still engaging in anti-social conduct, the last thing his parent needs to hear is that he's completely fine. There aren't a lot of things I would say I get offended at, but that is one of them. Please don't pretend you know anything at all about my child from a 2-hour small group every other week.)
We've been going off and on to a Sunday morning church near our new (almost year old) home. We haven't gotten past Sunday morning, though. There are times when I think it would feel really nice to fall into a place where I could borrow someone else's strength for a while. But when you're in the middle of the train wreck, people aren't lining up to start a new relationship.
Somehow, I need to find the strength to get myself together long enough to make a friend.
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