The end of last May started what became the worst three weeks of my life.
One day as I sat in my recently deceased grandmother’s house, sitting Shiva with my family, we all had to take a second to laugh at the utter turmoil that I had recently faced. Between Memorial Day and the second week in June, I experienced my first true heartbreak, got into my first car accident, secured a summer job, promptly lost that job two days later when the restaurant shut down (and before you ask, no I didn’t get paid), and then, just to top it all off, my grandmother, who had been living with Alzheimer’s for most of my life, passed away just days after her 89th birthday. It was already a summer to remember, and summer hadn’t even officially started yet.
The worst part of the “Hardest _____ Of Your Life” is that it never just lasts the time that the events actually take place. Two and a half year long relationships rarely break cleanly. When you lose a job, you have to find a new one. When somebody dies, you are left with an irreparable crack in the foundation of your life and a house filled with memories that perhaps are too painful to relive. Now, just about a year later, I’m still feeling some affects.
The people I know are probably thinking, “But how could this year be so bad when you met me…went abroad…had one of the highest GPAs of your life…did this thing and this thing and the other thing?”
And to you I say, you’re right. I am really thankful for the friends that I have made over the last year, for meeting one of my favorite professors that I’ve ever had, for having the opportunity to travel the world for a whole semester. But the positive events don’t mean that I couldn’t still feel sad/angry/anxious too. Happy doesn’t counteract sad -- you can feel the two simultaneously.
As I started my fall semester, the events of my summer would sometimes creep back into my life when I least expected them to--in September, October, January. And each time I would start feeling bad again, I would try to talk myself out of it. With each new wave of emotion, I was further and further separated from the actual events of the summer according to both my brain and the calendar, so clearly I had to be exaggerating or overreacting. I didn’t deserve to still feel these things.
The thing is, I deserve to have emotions. Everyone deserves to have emotions. They’re weird and uncomfortable and impossible to control, and the only thing you can do is let yourself feel them. One of my biggest downfalls is that I try to rationalize everything bad that happens to me until I can no longer justify feeling bad. But my feelings don’t go away when I do that, they just get bottled up until they come out somehow, either comically or stupidly or dangerously. You can’t rationalize the irrational. It just doesn’t work.
The last 12 months have been really good and really bad and really hard and really easy and really a lot of things. Like most of life, they were complicated. My grandmother’s caretaker bought my grandma’s house and was able to get out of the bad neighborhood that she had previously been living in. I would never have had applied to go abroad if I didn’t go through a breakup. Bad things can lead to a chain reaction of more bad things, but they can also open up room for something amazing to happen.
When it’s time for the "Hardest _____ Of Your Life," you can let yourself feel sad for however long it takes, but try to seek happiness too. Weirdly enough, there’s room for both.
