It’s Been Tough to Hold Things Together Lately

Everyone’s talking about how ‘things are looking better’ and I just feel like a fraud because I can’t feel it

Eileen Wiedbrauk
7 min readMar 16, 2022
Photo by Alex Alvarez on Unsplash

It’s been so hard to hold things together lately.

Let’s just take a moment and feel that: It’s been hard to hold things together lately.

It feels good to say, because I haven’t been saying it. I’ve been saying I’m fine, Things are good, Can’t complain, Oh you know just winterish, Doing all right — how bout you?

Everyone’s talking about how “things are looking better” now — pandemic things, economy things, job market things, child care things, spring is around the corner — and I can’t see it.

Oh, I can understand the words and logic. I can appreciate the cautious optimism. But I can’t see it for myself.

Because I can’t feel it for myself.

I’m not feeling better. I’m not feeling like better is on my near horizon.

It makes me feel like a fraud. I am a fake. A façade. I mirror human optimism; I don’t feel it.

It’s been two years that we’ve been in this pandemic. What the heck just happened to us?

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Eileen Wiedbrauk

Writer. Geek. Coffee addict. Former editor. MFA grad. Odyssey Workshop alum. Library fangirl. Escaped cubicle minion. Home cook. On a mission for better health.