Your Life is Not a S#%* Show

“My life is such a s#%* show!”

I hear it from you. I’ve felt it myself.

Divorce wrecks everything, and it feels like the worst kind of awful when thing after thing goes wrong, injustice after injustice happens, and you can’t get anything right or straight. EVER. It’s always piling on. ALWAYS. You get your bearings and then boom - another beatdown.

The “my life is s#%* show” exclamation is shorthand for so many feelings. I quit. This is laughable. This is unbelievable. No one else is struggling like this. I can’t catch a break. Nothing is working. I can’t. I won’t. Somebody see me.

In the overload that is divorce and legal processes and coparenting aches and misunderstandings and the whole load of relational hurt, a lot can seem to be going wrong for you.

I’m not going to argue with you that this is hard, and I’m not going to take away your “my life is a s#%* show” cry.

I’m not.

But I’m also not going to let you end with that one statement. You can start there, just don’t end there.

Your brain is throwing up all kinds of ideas about what is going on with you right now. It’s panicked because it’s walking in territory it has never been in. It’s fearful and doesn’t have a lot of data to help you refer back to in order to calm you down. It just reacts, and it thinks my systems are overloaded we better cue the s#%* show cry.

When you hear the familiar s#%* show cry, I want to challenge you to have a conversation with your brain. And I want you to promise me that YOU will get the last word, not that freaked out, overwhelmed, panicked brain of yours.

Here’s how a sample conversation with yourself could go:

My life is a s#%* show!

Oh?

How is it a s#%* show?

Well, my coparent is rude, and my refrigerator broke, and my kid broke his arm.

And how are you handling it?

I’m upset with my coparent, I cried looking at my fridge, and I’m frustrated that the appointments for this broken arm are just another stressor on my time and energy.

This is incredibly hard, but what are you doing right here?

✨This is where you start talking differently to yourself about what’s happening.

With my coparent I’m experimenting with new communcation styles, I called a repair company for the fridge, and I love this kid with my everything and I’ll make sure he gets great care. Yes, it’s hard, but I’m also handling it.

It may sound trite at first, but when “my life is a s#%* show” becomes “my life is a s#%* show, but here’s what I’m figuring out,” your world starts to change.

It’s not just positive thinking. It’s proven brain science. What we focus on expands. When we focus on the s#%* show and not on our ever-increasing capacity to handle it, we tell our brain to stay put and keep reacting from the crazy. That little add on “and I’m figuring it out” puts your brain at ease and gives it directions to start finding out how that part is truer than the s#%* show part.

“My life is full of a lot of new and challenging situations, and I’m meeting them every day and figuring them out.”

Me too.

Let’s be kind to ourselves.