I don't got this. (Don't worry, it's still an upbeat post.)

“You got this” is my least favorite stoke-up.

I’ve used it. Sparingly. I’ve gratefully accepted it, too.

Because at the right time, “you got this” means “I see that you’re strong, smart, resilient and capable, even if you don’t right now.” Or, “Yeah, this clustercuff seems big to you now, but you’ve fried bigger fish—remember?”

Then there’s the wrong time.

We want to believe there is no wrong time. Because even if we don’t have the resources to pull though—you got this—you’ll rustle them up, somehow!

We like our myth that systemic bullshit is no match for underdog scrappiness—you got this!

No matter how powerful the forces of nature and government are against your tiny human form, we need to say,

You got this!

You’ve got to got this.

Because if you don’t got this, maybe I don’t got this either.

*

“You went to a dark place just then,” says my friend Adam at the coffeeshop this morning. We’re co-working. He’s studying, launching a new career. I’m blowing the few hours I get before the pain kicks in too hard to sort out solutions for myself.

But there are no solutions. There are only brainteasers like,

How do I work and pursue medical care at the same time, when I can really only choose one, but they both feed off and into each other?

How do I apply for disability to not have to work so much, when applying for disability is a ton of (unpaid) work that bans paid work?

How do I move any projects forward when thinking too deeply kicks off monstrous headaches? When I entirely forget what I was doing if I break things up?

How do I pay for bills that are now two or three times greater than my earnings, on disability or not?

My whole life, I could charm, outsmart, grind, or write my way through anything.

I wrote my way into scholarships to go out of state for college, snuck into an apartment at 1/3 the going rate for the last 14 years, exited the workforce long before it was cool to launch a copywriting consultancy, and developed ever more elaborate workarounds for a tsunami of mounting symptoms.

I never had enough resources, the forces at play were always bigger, but I knew, wits intact and proverbial pen in hand, I got this.

And I did.

*

I didn’t lose my tools all at once. They slowly sank into bigger and scarier symptoms, like when my neck feels like it’s fully dislocating from my head after a “long” (more than an hour) writing sesh.

And they’re not fully gone, either. I’ve kept stuffing rags into various leaking parts of my life for the past few years, finding solutions where there didn’t seem to be any.

But I can’t sit at my desk and concentrate anymore, not without hellacious payback. This post will hurt me. I can feel myself leaning too hard into it. I gave myself an hour to write it. It’s already been an hour and a half. It’ll be three before it’s done. Can’t stop, won’t stop, will stop when my head finally caves and I’m too dizzy to go on, which is far, far from how bad it can get and far, far sooner than where I used to stop.

The dark place is what I see when I look into my toolbox.

It’s the place where scrappy little solutions used to live. Where patch that in and Mike knows a guy and just bat your eyelashes and there’s a coupon and hold it together with some chewing gum and yes, you got this used to live.

But now, there’s nothing there.

*

My friend Andrew knows me better than Adam. Recently, I called to get his big brain cooking on my next disability-friendly business venture.

But first, Andrew. He started his first business when we were in junior high, married his soul mate, and passed their mutually excellent genes on to three commercial-worthy blonde children. He’s funny-for-real, smart and was a millionaire by thirty. (I assume.) He even has all his hair. And he’s absolutely lovely about being so blessed.

(I know.)

Andrew’s got this his whole life.
A sense of fulfilled destiny blasts out of the man.

Anyway, ring ring, how’s things, and then Andrew said,

“So you’ve got an incurable disease that fries your brain, wrecks your memory, wracks you with pain, eats up all your time in doctor appointments, locks you in the bathroom for the majority of your waking hours, and you want to know how to redesign your life to fit into all that?”

“Yes!” I responded, eager to hear his entrepreneurial brilliance.

“Kira, you don’t.”

I felt my eyes sting with the unexpected reality of what he was saying.

“These are serious, substantial limitations. You can’t just…work around this one.”

Buried under those words:
you don’t got this.

Hearing it felt like a relief.

*

Andrew could have said “you got this.”

It would have been easier for him—to not have to stare into the dark place with me at that moment. To have left me on my own. You’ve got this! Aaaaand I’ve got something else I need to do. Toodle-pip!

He could have pretended that my problems were smaller than I made them out to be, or that I just wasn’t adequate enough to face them—a personal failing. You got this! And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.

He could have denied the reality of my circumstances.
I often do. I’m doing it right now, pushing to finish this post.

But he didn’t. As a clear-eyed optimistic outsider, he spoke the unspeakable thought that had been haunting my foggy brain.

Saying it made it real.

And now, that dark place just looks like the truth.
Daunting. But faced.

*

I don’t got this, and I’m not sure what that means yet.

Probably, asking for help. Even more help than I already have asked for. (#$%.) And, you know, accepting it.

Giving things up that I don’t want to give up—my business or Bozeman, my independence or my covert craft chocolate habit.

Cracking open to possibilities I can’t see yet. Enduring the things I thought I couldn’t.

Finding out who I am, under the next layer of loss. I’ve learned who I am without skiing and hiking and muscle tone and pretty hair and a waistline and walking and working full time, part time, small time, tiny time.

I keep getting smaller. But maybe the next matryoshka doll under this one is an even badder bitch. Tiny as she is.

I don’t got this. Like so many other people falling between the cracks in the system, society, and nature, I’m not going to be able to pull a photo finish out of this one. I can’t find an elegant answer when it isn’t there. As my Mom so eloquently says, you can’t fight a fog.

But finally admitting that enormous insurmountability, accepting a major degree of inevitable defeat, and gathering the resources to face it feels like,

maybe,
in a twisted undreamed-of roundabout way,
somehow,

I do.