Everything feels… suspended.
For nine years, Mark and I have lived in a rental that we planned to inhabit for one, planning to buy a house – something we’ve never been able to manage.
For two years, we’ve been in a state of political suspension, broken only when President Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris jumped into the race.
For more than a year, we’ve watched as friend after friend battled cancer, some of them succumbing to this horrid disease.
For eleven months, I’ve been searching for a job, poring over thousands and thousands of job listings – often hundreds in a day, and applying to more than fifty jobs.
For a long summer, we’ve waited out the endless heat waves, one after another, the oppressive temperatures like a lid on a pressure cooker that we can’t escape.
And through it all, we’ve waited.
We go on with our lives, living in the uncomfortable in-between, and hoping things will someday get better.
I’ve talked with my therapist at length about this oppressive feeling of stuckness – the sense that life will never be anything other than this.
There is no cure. Only treatments.
Treating ourselves to coffee or a meal with friends. Getting out to see a movie, to forget about the in-between for a couple hours. Watching something new on television that makes us smile or laugh.
It’s all bandaids, workarounds, salves on an open wound.
And yet time eventually moves us past all things. It caries us forward into the future, sometimes willingly, sometimes kicking and screaming. Sooner or later, something will shift.
In the meantime, we make lemons into lemonade. We find those small pleasures and little moments to relieve the stifling stuckness of the in-between. And we practice hope each day, like a religion, to keep our happiness muscles sharp for when we shall once again need them.
Something’s gonna give to shift us out of the in-between. It’s just a matter of time.