C'est la vie

C'est la vie. That's life. I may be a jaded optimist but I am no Susie Sunshine, I know what overwhelmed feels like.
~J.V. Manning

It has been one of "those” weeks. One of those every-other-day-something-goes-to-shit weeks. The kind of week when all you want to do is shut off your phone, pull the shades, turn off all the lights, and hope life thinks you're out getting coffee. When in truth; you are on the couch, wrapped like an enchilada in your favorite blanket - hiding and trying to be covert.

Like life and what comes with it actually buys your ruse.

Crap still happens. Crisis arise. More crisis arise. Just when you think you have hit your limit...something else occurs. You want to throw up your arms and scream colorful expletives. You start to take it personally, like life has a vendetta against you. Stress brings tense shoulders, headaches and sleepless nights. You twitch every time your phone rings - thinking "What now!" Only to then agree to purchase two magazine subscriptions someone was selling because the salesman wasn't calling with more bad news and you found yourself incredibly grateful. (I may now have subscriptions - oops)

Life seems to like the whole; let's wind her up and watch her spin, once in a while. Piling on lessons, trials and complete freak-out situations not in a nice controlled fashion, like two crisis a month, but seven separate events all in the same week. What fun for life! (please note dripping sarcasm)

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My week started with an emergency run to the Vet with one of the stray cats who showed up at my door in a snowstorm two weeks ago and who had apparently not seen fit to tell me he had an abscess that needed tending to. Then two separate medical crisis with different people and culminating with my husband and son hitting a deer last night on a back road near where we live.

They were okay and while the car sustained some damage and unfortunately the deer didn't make it, it could have been so much worse. There were a lot of ways that accident could have played out and thankfully it worked out that my husband and kid walked into our house and could hug me close.

It was in talking with my kid about the accident that the lesson of this week became clear. He was giving his father a hard time about not stopping for sandwiches on the way home, saying the delay would have cause them to avoid hitting the deer. I looked at him and said; maybe. But maybe not stopping meant you just hit one deer and not all three of them. Or maybe had the deer had time to move on, a moose could have been standing there instead, making the accident way worse.

Each of the medical crisis started off with a routine visit to the doctor. Then it got far away from routine when the doctor found something alarming. Life started to move pretty fast there for a while and the outcomes were uncertain. Tests were run. Blood was drawn. Then, the hurry up and wait. In the end - both had favorable outcomes. Though each one of them ended up in a different place than where they started that day, they now had a warning that things weren't as they were supposed to be and needed to be seen to. It was emotionally draining for all involved, but again, could have been so much worse had no one found the issues.

The lesson - bad things happen.

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However, sometimes bad things have a way of working out if you just look at them a little differently. Instead of the "Why MEs!" Ask yourself what you need to see from this. What do you need to learn? Keep your perspective when everything happens at once. Had those doctors not found something and my loved ones continued on not knowing what was happening under the surface...? I could be facing something even worse down the road. Had my hubby and kid stopped for sandwiches, they may have missed hitting the deer, only to get hit by another driver or slide off the road. We have no control over timing of the shit that happens in life. We can't schedule accidents. We can't control emergencies. But we can control how we handle and react to them.

Weeks like this happen to everyone, all the time. It's never one thing at a time. But, usually everything attacking all at once. C'est la vie. That's life. I may be a jaded optimist but I am no Susie Sunshine, I know what overwhelmed feels like. I know that I get twitchy when my phone rings and my brain doesn't usually go to Yaa! I have a phone call, instead of immediately thinking - what's happened now? However, I noticed the shift in my stress level when I told my kid that there is always a different way to look at some things.

You face the crisis as it is happening. You do what needs doing. However, in those quiet moments afterwards instead of reenacting the crisis or event over and over, look at it from a different angle. Maybe it took something happening to get someone to change unhealthy behavior. Maybe if you took that different route home you could have missed one accident, only to get into another one that was even worse. Maybe the doctor finding something leads to something not happening that totally could have had no one found the issue. Things could always have been better, yes. But, they could have been so much worse, too.  

What we can't do is let weeks like this break us down.

C'est la vie. In French it sounds so much nicer. That's life. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it beats you up and spits you out. Sometimes it is simply just too much. It's going to happen.

Friedrich Nietzsche said; “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” I am still standing after a lot of weeks like this one under my belt. You are, too. Our track record for getting through the bad weeks is 100% because we are still here, fighting the good fight.

Maybe we need to send an email to the universe or something letting it know we are strong now. Wicked strong. Superhuman strong. We could carry semi-truck strong. Of course, with my luck, the universe would see this as a challenge and throw more my way.

Some weeks you just can't win. Though, in hindsight, I came out of this week a winner. Exhausted but a winner. My family is safe, cars can be fixed. My sweet friend knows to watch for certain things to keep herself healthy and another loved one finally got some hope into what has been an incredibly medical challenge. Cat is even healthy.

That which does not kill me... better run faster than me.

It's a bad week. Not a bad life. Remember that. 

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