This Body is Bullshit

Today Is Hard

I was late to work this morning because I couldn’t get off the shower floor.

Not because I fell. Just because I sat down and couldn’t make myself get up. My chest was tight. My eyes were full. Everything felt heavy and impossible and I just sat there with the water running, thinking about all of it.

That’s where I am today.

My chest is still tight. It feels like a panic attack, or the edges of one — that specific mix of sadness and anger that makes you want to curl into yourself and disappear for a while. I don’t live here usually. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Some people feel like this every day — the worry, the dread, the weight of it — and I genuinely don’t know how they function. I’m grateful I don’t carry this constantly. But today it’s bad, and I’m letting myself say that.

Maybe it’s the drinking. I don’t drink much anymore, but I got wasted at my friend’s birthday this weekend. Properly wasted — I don’t remember how the night ended. Yesterday I was just tired and beat up. Today feels like the emotional hangover came in harder than the physical one, which is saying something.

And then sitting on that shower floor, all the financial stuff just came flooding in. The debt I can’t see my way out of. The constant cycle of robbing Peter to pay Paul. I thought about sending the bills that are burying me to my stepdad and asking him to just pay them off so I could breathe. I hate that I even think that way. But I’m so tired of the pressure. I don’t want to cancel Pilates. I don’t want to give up the few things that make me feel like myself.

My mom always said when she died, Ken would give me money. She believed that. He didn’t — and I understand why, that’s not really how it works — but sometimes I think about how much that would change things right now. What it would feel like to just breathe for a minute financially.

Grace’s student loans are about to come due on top of everything else. I’m covering her undergrad. She’s handling her master’s herself. But I want to help her and I can’t, and that kills me. She’s already carrying a lot. I see it in her — how easily she gets frustrated, how she holds onto anger, how she keeps choosing guys who aren’t good enough for her. I just want her to feel light. Happy. Free. She deserves that so much more than she lets herself believe.

And underneath all of it, always, the quiet thing: will the cancer come back? I’ll never get to say I’m in remission. What I get is no evidence of disease — a phrase that feels like it comes with an expiration date I can’t see.

I just filed for FMLA to take my dad to his neurologist appointment. I’ve done it before, for my own surgeries earlier this year. And I keep thinking about all the employees I see who take FMLA for anxiety and depression and mental health. And I think — maybe I should do that. Maybe I need that. I need a fucking break. Not a weekend. A real break. A chance to stop holding everything together for five minutes.

Being in HR doesn’t help today. My whole job is managing other people’s feelings and crises. Most days I can hold compassion for that — I actually love that part of the work. But on days like this, when I’m already running on nothing, it hollows me out.

I want to be in Florida with Rusty and Heather. Or in Sayulita with Natalie, where everything felt lighter and the only decision was which direction to walk on the beach. I want to be somewhere that isn’t this — isn’t debt and fatigue and worry and scars that still ache and a nervous system that hasn’t gotten the message that the emergency is over.

I know tomorrow will be better. It usually is.

But today is hard. And I’m saying that out loud instead of telling everyone I’m fine.

That’s something, I think.