How She Does It

I get asked all the time, “How do you do it?”

How do I handle the hard, sucky, horrible parts of life?

Well, the same way everyone else does. I just do.

Sometimes I get help from friends,

sometimes I get help from professionals,

sometimes I get help from God.

But most of the time I ask myself the same question,

How do people do it?!

How do people deal with grief  their entire life?  It hasn’t even been 4 years yet and I’m ready for it to be over. When I think that it’s only been 3 and a half  years, and I have to deal with this for the rest of my life… it makes me want to throw up.

The Struggle Is Real

I look at people around me and wonder how they do it. They seem to have it so together. They are so strong, so spiritual, so happy. How can they be like that when life is this horrible? And then I think about how many people ask me the same question. I’m always a little taken back when people ask me this question, and thats because if people could see the “Behind the Scenes” of Stephanie Jade… they probably wouldn’t be asking.

A few months after my dad’s passing, I finally expressed some of my struggles to one of my friends.  I will never forget her reaction, she sighed with relief and said, “SO YOU ARE HUMAN.” ( I guess she was beginning to wonder if me and my family were some kind of super-humans that weren’t affected by grief and sorrow. hahaha).  She thought I was doing way better than I actually was. And from the outside, I appeared to have it all together, but on the inside, I was dying.

Around this same time, I was living with new roommates. They didn’t know everything I was going through. One night, we were all sitting on the couch and someone said to me, “You just have a permanent smile. Whenever I see you, you are smiling. You are so happy and I love it.” Little did she know, that every day when they were at school, I sat on that same couch and just looked out the window and cried.

Not very many people see the crap we go through. Not many people know how we are really doing. But the point is that we are all looking around at each other wondering, “How do they do it?”

You Are Capable

There are so many people out there that I look up to. I don’t know how they can have gone through all the hard things that they have, and still be so amazing and unstoppable. There are some seriously incredible people out there who have been through far worse things than me. And I will always wonder how they do it. My siblings, my mom, my Friends, random people on the internet, and maybe even you.

Life is tough, but so are you.

Anxiety. Depression. Grief.  It looks different for everyone.

• Overwhelming heartaches
• Unbearable emotional stress
• Unthinkable/ unexpected changes
• Medical bills
• Law suites
• Living expenses (Where my college kids at??)
• Single parent households
• Post-traumatic stress
• Anger
• Fear
• Failure
• Self-doubt
• Loneliness

These are just some of the trials me and my family are dealing with right now, and I’m guessing that you can relate to some of them.

So give yourself some credit. You are doing hard things.

You might be sitting here wondering how someone else is doing it….

but I bet they are looking at you and wondering the same thing.

The Bright Side

We, all humans on this planet, are capable of doing incredible things. Including the capability to endure incredibly crappy things.

I may not know you. I may not know your trials. But I do know that you got this. That your struggle is real and that you can endure it. Even if “it” lasts for the rest of mortality. You will find a way and you will make it. And others will look at you and wonder, “How does she do it?

 

and just remember, You don’t have to do it alone!  We are all in the struggling boat. Here are a few of my favorite talks and videos that you might like:

Awesome with  Alison pep talk

Where Faith, Love and Mercy meet Video

The Truth About Mental Health and Entrepreneurship with Jen Gotch

Rachel Hollis daily practice