I started this blog with a silent pledge to be as honest and as open as I could be. I wanted it to be a place where I could tackle hard topics, and not shy away from being real. 

I wanted to use my writing to reach people who may benefit from it in some way, if only to make them realise they’re not alone. And to this day, it’s one of my motivators to continue writing. 

Because no matter how small my platform is, I recognise it still exists, and I want to use it for the good. I want to use it to promote change. And all change needs to start somewhere. 

Sometimes change stems from hard places. I know, because I’ve hit a few of those this year. Maybe you have too?

You see, there’s the ‘baseline’ hard — Covid, restrictions, lockdowns, etc. And then there is the ‘life’ hard — all the extra stress that comes along, pushes itself to the surface, demands your attention and needs to be resolved before you can move on.

Those things pile on top of the regular, everyday stresses, compounding them. 

You’re stuck underneath the pile, gasping for air, trying to breathe through it somehow, but the weight is stifling, the strain feels like it’s too much to bear. And sometimes it is.

 

 

Dealing with the baseline level is difficult enough. But it’s the extra stuff, when paired with the everyday stresses, that can be paralysing. Even though we know that challenging times are inherent in living, it can be a genuine struggle to see beyond them. 

Someone once told me that stress is our body’s way or letting us know that something is important to us. It wants to get noticed, it needs our attention — and now. So we have no choice but to deal with it. 

But, eventually all things pass. Life is fluid, and time has a way of healing even the toughest of times. Things move on, you move on. You get through it, you grow through it. And then you sail along calmly until the next storm hits. 

The thing is, life will never be without storms. All we can ask is that they don’t hit at exactly the same time.