72. holding too much

“Sometimes, Amelia, when it feels like you’re holding too much, it’s because you’re holding too much.”

My dear friend Amber once said this to me when I was feeling overwhelmed, overextended, and overburdened. It was such a simple reflection, but one that cracked me open with a sense of being seen, recognized, known, in the midst of holding too much invisible stress and too many ordinary human limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this during this time we’re living through, when it seems like everyone is holding too much.

Too much worry and not enough rest. 

Too much financial stress and not enough ease. 

Too much uncertainty and not enough groundedness. 

It has me thinking about the ways we choose the too-much-ness, and the ways it’s simply the water we’re swimming in. 

My fingers freeze on the keyboard as my mind hops, skips, flips, falters, across all the examples I could give. 

But you know, because you’re also living them.

Your little one is sick for a week again, for what seems like the hundredth time this winter. His little body has been worn out by fever, aches, tummy pain, a terrible cough, and the emotional stress of it all. Maybe it’s a normal part of being a kindergartener, but they’re home for the sixth day in a row, crying from exhaustion, and so are you, because no one’s gotten any sleep. 

Your fifteen year old is careening through a time of wild rebellion, drinking and vaping and stealing the car, lying and preening and not seemingly giving a fuck when your love comes out as worry, or discipline, and she tells you to just love her less. 

Your sibling is ill, fighting battles only they can truly know, but cannot face alone. So you fight alongside them, for them, with the systems they must navigate, with the judgments they face, with the toll it takes on your parents, partner, and your own inner peace. 

Your child is trans, just coming into adulthood in a culture that is waging violence against their very existence. You do all the things you can do to love them, protect them, support them and keep them safe, but there is no way to shut out the cacophony of hate which reaches them, embroiling itself in their sense of self, even as you effort in every way to surround them with a blanket of love big enough to cover all the hurt. 

Your parents are undocumented, living in a society that has always been a risk, but now, as they are crossing into elderhood and have given everything to build a safer, better life for you, their own safety, security, stability and hard-earned sense of belonging is more tenuous than ever. 

Your needs are met, you manage to get by every month and the bills are paid, but there’s not much extra. All around, folks are losing their jobs, food costs are rising, and it feels harder than ever to get ahead, to get a firm footing, to trust in the likelihood of future steadiness and abundance. You keep working, in all the ways you know how, and the expenses keep coming, in all the ways that they do, and you fall asleep at night exhausted, mind half-racing, trying to solve tomorrow’s problems as a way to feel safer tonight. 

Your marriage is changing - or maybe it’s you changing - or them? Or both. It’s both. The ways you’re growing and changing are meaningful, but also creating a chasm between you that sometimes feels impossible to reach across. Some days are okay, too many aren’t, and both hearts have grown weary and withdrawn from too many encounters which left you both misunderstood. 

In all of it, the worry, fear, uncertainty, grief, exhaustion, longing, hope, pain, effort, care, and love, and love, and love. 

Sometimes even the love is too much.

Then there is the too-muchness that is harder to pinpoint, further from ‘home,’ but closer to all of us, because it is shared. 

Too much violence, extraction, dominance, greed, hate, fear, othering, disregard, bypassing, paralysis, addiction, speed, noise, forgetting, numbing, disconnection, disconnection, disconnection. 

Can you feel that? If you can feel it, whatever part of it, know this - I can feel it, too. 

That means we are feeling it together. Whatever parts you’re holding, especially the ones you feel like you’re holding alone, can you feel where they are woven into that bigger picture? Can you sense the way we hold it together, the too-much-ess of it all? 

That’s the only way we’ve ever held it, I think. Even when it’s that aching, cold, withdrawn, misunderstood, forgotten, senseless disconnection - no, especially that - when you feel it, can you touch in to all the others feeling it, too? 

Right there, the web. The fabric of human existence, woven of our love and longing, our pain and disconnection. In our fragmentation, we are whole. In our ten billion fractals of holding too much, we are each holding it with 9,999,999,999 others, each in the fullness of their experience. And that’s just our human kin. 

If you feel like you’re holding too much, it’s probably because you’re holding too much. I won’t tell you to let it go, or to hold less, because I know you are doing what you choose and what you must.

But I will offer this: in all that you are holding, can you sense the others holding too? Can you feel us, holding it all, holding it together, holding the too-much-ness, and can you take a very deep breath - even just one, not right now, but whenever you choose - and let the web feel what you are holding in the too-full chamber of your heart? 

When you’re ready, can you exhale, lean back into the Mystery that is holding you, and send as much love and solidarity as you can muster, to all those who are holding too-much, too? 

Like that. As many as we need. Just holding it, holding our own, holding the tension, holding on for dear life, holding our loved ones, holding the future, holding, as Francis Weller writes, “grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and letting ourselves be stretched large by them?”

When you need to, if you can, set some part of it down, and know that it’s still being held, because we’re all out here, being stretched larger and larger, and even as the ends of our ropes fray and unravel, we are weaving love, unceasing, unending, back into this tapestry of life. 

Through this small but real way we are connected, through these words I’m weaving into the ether, through this thread of hopeful connection… thanks for holding it with me.