When You Don’t Know What Else To Do, That’s When You Keep Fighting

It’s funny how when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong at once. You know what I mean. The day you fail an exam, get a speeding ticket, and find out that your “forever love” was sleeping with his “we’re just best friends” study buddy, all in the same day. Fate is cruel like that. I am a perpetual planner. I plan my meals, my workouts, when I’ll graduate, where I’m gonna live, who I’m gonna be married to – when fate just looks at me and laughs. Because plans mean nothing in this crazy world.

What do we do in times like these? When our plans, comfort, and very spirit are worn down and broken?

Personally, I’ve always just powered through. I am usually the type of girl that can shut the world out and get shit done, no matter what is going on around me. But lately I’ve been different. I don’t know what has caused this change, but I feel things more deeply. In these past few months, I lose sleep over disturbing things on TV, I shut down when I’m stressed, and I give into this feeling that nothing will ever be right again in the world because my brilliant plan fell through. All in one summer, I graduated college, got a job, and got into graduate school. YAY! Right?

No. Right as my plan was going perfectly, I got a call that my mom was in the hospital, and things were looking bad. I flew back to my hometown into a place of chaos. Where I had lost all control. Where I couldn’t fix the situation. I had lost all sense of safety. All of my plans didn’t matter anymore.

I’ll go off track for just a second and say, call your parents. Tell them that you love them every day. And don’t say, “If I only had the time.” Because one day, like me, you really won’t. There’s nothing like picking up the phone to dial your mom’s number to only realize that – oh, I can’t call her to tell her about my day. She’s not here to give me advice. There is no feeling like having big news and having no one to call. Because they don’t care. Hell, frankly they don’t have time to care anymore. I know what you’re thinking, “How could you care so much about your news when your mom is sick?” Because I wanted to pretend that life was normal. That she was okay. And my dad is okay. And that my family will make it through it.

Don’t try to pretend. Don’t wait for fate to turn your way again.

Don’t wait for life to lesson in its difficulty, because it won’t. And frankly that’s the whole point of my writing this. What do you do when you don’t know what to do anymore?

You fight. You believe in yourself.

You believe in God. You trust that He knows where your life will lead and that you can’t control everything. You make a decision that one bad day or week or YEAR doesn’t define the beautiful life you were created to live. That you have a purpose, even if you don’t know what that is yet. And you were born for more than giving up when life gets tough.