A Hero’s Journey, But It’s Just Me Getting Out of Bed

There are days when getting out of bed feels like climbing Mount Everest.

Not literally — no frostbitten fingers, no oxygen tanks, no Sherpa watching me cry because my sock seam feels “wrong.” But emotionally? It’s the same mountain. And the worst part? I can see the summit. It’s right there. The summit is: Stand up. Walk downstairs. And yet my brain acts like I’m gearing up for a National Geographic documentary.

People say things like “Just put your feet on the floor!” with the same confidence of someone telling you the secret to losing weight is “Just eat less.” If it were that easy, Karen, I wouldn’t be lying here calculating whether I have the energy to blink.

I wish I could be one of those people who wakes up, stretches, springs out of bed, and decides it’s a great day to go for a jog or scrub baseboards or alphabetize the spice rack.

Meanwhile I’m over here negotiating with myself like:

“If you get up now, you can sit on the couch instead.”

“If you walk to the kitchen, you don’t even have to cook — just vibe in front of the fridge like a sad little goblin.”

“If you check the mailbox, there’s a 1% chance it’s not bad news.”

There’s this invisible weight that sits on my chest some mornings — the kind of heavy that isn’t dramatic enough to write about in a medical journal but is absolutely heavy enough to keep me from standing up. It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of motivation. It’s not “needing a better morning routine” (thanks, reels).

It’s mental illness.

It’s exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

It’s depression creeping in like a fog machine at a middle-school dance.

It’s anxiety whispering, “Don’t move, something might go wrong.”

It’s trauma saying, “You’re safer here.”

And yet — I still want to be the person who can just will themselves into action. I want to be the person who throws on shoes and checks the mailbox without giving themselves an internal TED Talk about perseverance. I want to be the person whose brain doesn’t turn a simple task into a death-defying expedition.

But here’s the thing I’m slowly learning:

Getting out of bed is climbing Mount Everest for some of us.

That doesn’t make us weak.

It just means we’re hiking a different mountain.

And on the days I finally swing my legs over the edge of the mattress, stand up, and take even five steps?

That’s my summit. That’s my flag at the top. That’s my “Hey, look, Ma, I made it!”

Some people climb Everest for bragging rights.

Some of us climb it just to get to the couch.

Both are victories.

The Grief Monster Comes for Us All

 I experienced a lot of funerals as a kid.  I can't put a number on it, but I remember going to quite a few.  My parents weren't old, but they had me in their mid-thirties and they had some family members that were on the older side and it just seemed like people were always dying.  My paternal grandfather died before I was born and then my step-grandfather died when I was like six.  Great grandparents went as an adolescent and grandparents were gone in my teens, with my last one passing in my early twenties.  Then I was exposed to tragedies like a middle school nurse dying in a car wreck, a friend in high school committing suicide, a friend in my late twenties committing suicide... I think that the way I learned to handle it was by just reminding myself that death was part of life and never thinking about the people again.

Sounds easy, right?  Of course it's not possible, we know this.  Some are easier to forget than others.  Some you never forget.  Some remain burned into your memories and haunt you at the most inopportune times.  Then comes the big death- the death of a parent.  I have not experienced the death of a child, and I hope never to have to.  I have a friend that I have recently seen experience this and I can't even fathom her pain.  But in my case, I finally experienced the death of a parent.   One of my best friends lost both of her parents at a young age and she was very close to them.  I went to the funerals and I have seen how hard it has been on her.  But I didn't think it would be like that for me because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my parent.  

But then when my dad started to get sick, one of my therapists worried because she said that people with borderline personality disorder experience loss differently if we have unresolved trauma.  She told my husband that I was going to take it hard.  I told myself that she didn't know me as well as she thought because I would accept it like I did every other death in my life.  Okay, so maybe I was wrong, and maybe she was right.  My sister-in-law once told me that I should have a "come to Jesus" moment with my dad and tell him how I felt about how I was raised.  I disagreed.  I thought it would put an undue strain on our already strained relationship.  Why say unkind things to each other when we clearly are two different people who think completely different things?  Those would leave memories that could never be taken back.  She said if he died having never unburdened myself I'd regret it.  I'm glad I didn't listen to her.  Like I thought, I would never have wanted my dad to have died knowing that I felt the way that I did.  Instead, the last memory I want him to have of me is the text I sent him telling him that I loved him.

What will I have?  Grief.  But just like with all those funerals I went to as a child, I'm trying to tell myself that death is a part of life.  But then it raises questions about my own mortality that I don't want to think about.  And that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog- or therapy session.

(See, I told you I'd make another post!)