Is Life One Long Street Fight? Spoiler Alert: Yes.

(Image Credit: the author on Canva with an image from Pixabay by David Mark.)

Don't Give Up

"Too many people simply give up too easily. You have to keep the desire to forge ahead, and you have to be able to take the bruises of unsuccess. Success is just one long street fight."
~ Milton Berle

This is one of my favorite quotes because I think most people assume success/failure is an either/or type of thing when actually life is a series of successes and failures. For most people you cannot have success without suffering a lot of failure and being willing to get up again and fight and get up again and fight and keep doing that pretty much until you die. I wish more people understood that when life gets challenging, that is normal and does not constitute failure. I wish I remembered that all the time. I have found myself forgetting it frequently recently.

This Week

This week has been a real struggle, and it has been hard to write because I don’t know where to start and I have too much to say, most of which is raw and emotional. I have written several drafts of various things, which I will probably work with and they will come out in some form or another, but I don’t know what to do with them right now.

Why has this week been a struggle? First, I am always hesitant to say that my life is challenging because I am acutely aware that many people have it much more difficult than I do in absolutely every respect. That being said, something I used to tell my clients when I was a counsellor was that we each have our own problems, and those problems are significant to us even if we are aware that other people might have bigger problems. It is important to honour and take care of ourselves even when we know that we don’t have a monopoly on suffering.

What is Going On?

Gratitude is important, and it is a wonderful thing, but it has to be tempered with self-love and self-care. So, here are the big issues I am currently dealing with:

1. The biggest issue by far, and it overshadows everything, is that my 84 year old father had to go to the hospital emergency again on Sunday, and he has been there ever since.
2. My older sister’s husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
3. My younger sister had a close friend who completed a suicide today. I knew the friend as well although, for me, she was “only” an online friend. It is still very sad.

There are some other problems going on in my life. I think some of them are intertwined. For example, I haven’t really been exercising or eating right and my weight is backsliding a little. I can’t sleep properly. I am not getting along well with my adult daughter (which is not new). My adult daughter is mentally ill. I suffer from depression on and off, and I consider that to be mental illness, but my daughter has even more serious concerns; she decided to stop taking any psychotropic medication this year. That might be the right decision for her or it might not, but it is very frustrating to speak to her, and she is incredibly abusive.

She would say that I am the problem. I would agree that I am part of the problem because in any sort of conflict, each person is always part of the problem. Is that true? If I just walked up to a random stranger and punched them in the nose, are they part of the problem? To be honest, when it comes to my daughter, I don’t know what is what. One day, I will write some posts just about my daughter and the difficulties inherent in that relationship. That day is not today.

You might be starting to see the issue – why I have written so little this week. I am at 500 words and I feel like I have essentially said nothing. What is my point?

No People

We have a very small family. Tiny. My mother passed away two and a half years ago. That means that, in this city, the amount of family that my
father has is precisely one person: me.

I am what I call “partially disabled.” I call myself “partially disabled” because my ego cannot quite make the leap to “disabled” although it is probably more accurate. I feel as though all my disabilities are “fixable” and therefore not “real” disabilities. However, while technically my mental health does periodically go into remission and improves, and my physical issues are potentially surmountable, the reality is that for my entire adult life, I have had severe problems that have limited me in every conceivable way.

I wish there was another category – something between able-bodied and disabled. It seems very unfair to people who, for example, are quadriplegic, to call myself disabled when there could theoretically be some treatment that would render me non-disabled.

More Falls to Me

However, I am going off on a tangent. My point is that all my Dad has is me and some friends of his and my partner, and I am not able to do as much as I would like. Because both of my sisters (neither of whom lives in the country) are currently shell-shocked by their own terrible news, I feel like everything is falling on my shoulders.

Dad is in bad shape and I am worried about him. He has fluid in his lungs. He has two clogged arteries and a leaky valve in his heart. He has an enlarged prostate that will probably require surgery. If that was not bad enough, he has a hernia.

In some ways he is in good condition. His mind is sharp. He lives alone in a fairly big house. He takes care of his own house and yard when he is not in the hospital. He buys his own groceries, makes his own meals, takes care of his own finances, etc. He exercises regularly and eats quite healthily, a Mediterranean diet.

However, there is no doubt that he will, at the very least, require one more lung drainage and open heart surgery. If those go well, he will probably also need the hernia operated on and prostate surgery. I love him so much. I worry because that’s a lot of surgery for anyone, let alone someone 84 years old!

My father is very mentally strong, but also extremely pessimistic… he would say “realistic,” so it is hard to talk to him. I cannot cheer him up. The best I can do is to bring him things that make his life slightly less terrible. For example, the hospital food is awful, and I don’t want to go against doctor’s orders, but I bring fresh fruit. The hospital does not provide fresh fruit, and he is allowed to eat it. The hospital provides tea, but he says it tastes horrible, so I brought him tea bags with better tea. These are very small things, but literally all I can do to make things better. Not much better.

Cell Phone

He has no cell phone, and he has been driving the nurses on the ward insane because he has friends from all over the world who call him. He was a professor, and he has math friends from around the globe. He has been adamant about not wanting a cell phone. However, I finally decided he really needs one, so one of my sisters and I bought him one for an early Christmas present. I will be giving it to him and going through the arduous process of explaining how it works when I visit tomorrow.

I told him about the phone today because I was fairly certain he would be angry about it. It’s a long story, but my father hates most gifts that I get him, and this has been true much of my life. He is not secretive about this. So, I wanted to get any irritation out of the way prior to actually bringing the phone – pave the way, so to speak.

I was pleasantly surprised that he seemed to like the idea of it. I think he is lonely and tired of getting his wrist slapped for getting so many phone calls. Also, he likes audiobooks, and I mentioned that he can listen to audiobooks on the cell phone.

Disloyalty and Family

I feel terribly disloyal saying anything negative about my father. I am actually extremely worried about his health. I can barely stand to think about it. How do I cope? I eat too much. That is not a healthy coping style. Also, I have been avoiding exercising because I am so busy going back and forth to the hospital. I know my Dad would understand if I missed going because I was busy exercising, but I would not forgive myself. It would be easier if I were not the only family in town I think.

That being said, I went to pick something up from my father’s house today and I noticed his next door neighbor had shoveled his entire driveway and sidewalk. That was very kind. His neighbor often helps him with things like that when he can’t do them. It is really nice to know that someone is looking out for him. It takes a village to raise a parent. Isn’t that how the saying goes?

So, that’s basically just an update about the current struggle that is happening in my life, and I wish I could find some cool theme to pull it all together into some coherent blog entry to add some meaning or something, but I can’t. I am just confused and I feel lost and I don’t really know what to do. I am basically trying to hang in there.

No Reserves

I thought of trying to write something funny or crazy or distracting in some way, but I just don’t have it in me. I am completely stressed out. I think this is one of the challenges of living with depression. I simply don’t have reserves for when something like this happens. I was barely coping when things were “going well.” When things go wrong, it is very hard to keep it together.

I was astonished that my sister’s friend completed a suicide today. I was surprised because her friend really seemed positive. I should know better, but nobody knows, I think. Her friend was a trained therapist. It’s crazy. This world is very difficult for sensitive souls, and her friend was one. It makes me sad because her friend always wrote the kindest, sweetest, and most positive comments on Facebook, and she just really seemed like a lovely human being. Obviously, it would be sad no matter what, but she wasn’t someone you would think of as “depressed.”

Sadly, I think many people who complete suicides are like that. I wonder, and maybe this is a weird thought, if they would be less likely to complete a suicide if they could be more negative. I think sometimes (and I have written about this before), we have sort of a positive perfectionism, and we try so hard just to be “good” and feel “good” and project an aura of positivity, and when that fails, we feel like we are the failure instead of just saying maybe our lives are shitty “at the moment.” That’s the key, I think: realizing that a) things are crappy, and b) the crappiness is, we hope, temporary.

Too often, we fall into the trap of trying to sugarcoat the crap and tell ourselves that things are good when they are not good. Alternately, we realize things are bad, but we think that the bad will go on forever. Both are delusional results of depression.

Conclusion

I truly do believe that life is one long street fight. I have had both failures and successes, and I see my father battling it out in the hospital each day. What is "success," really? What I do know is that I don't know anyone who has simply rolled into success without any effort, struggles, or setbacks. I think many of us, particularly those of us who face obstacles in life (is that everyone, though?) are tempted to imagine that there are golden people out there who stumble into success magically and live some sort of charmed existence. However, I don't believe that is actually true. I think life might be easier for some people than for others (even much easier), but everyone faces a struggle. Everyone has their own dragons that need to be slain. It is sometimes hard to remember that life is one long street fight for all of us, and we need to be as kind and supportive as possible to each other to make it just a little easier to get through.

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Lucky you. You have made it to the end of another depressing post by me. This was a long one, too. Gold star for you if you made it this far! Thank you for reading my words. I am constantly awed and honoured by how many people on Hive actually read and respond to what I write. It feels really good. I try to reciprocate and engage as much as I can, which is not always as much as I would like. Since I can’t seem to find the time every day, I try to at least do it a few times per week. Anyhow, as I said, thank you. I appreciate your reading my stuff. I will try to make the next one shorter and less dismal?

(P.S. Does anyone know why the photo previews are no longer displaying on Ecency mobile? They seemed to disappear about a week ago and I have been too discombobulated to research why this is happening. I see headlines, but no photos now. Not a huge deal, but curious.)