It has been a long-standing joke about how incredibly loooong January has been. While others find it a joke, it kind of feels like reality for me.
I am not a fan of resolutions and “new year, new me”. I always believed that these changes are not something you decide on over a night of fireworks and wine. Sounds like your New Year Scrooge, but yeah. We started 2024 with some plans though. One is to get us a place we would call home. And… we might have maneuvered through it quite quickly, which has been tedious and exhausting. We have spent all three weekends of the first month of the year driving and visiting places which could possibly be our forever home. We did it rain or shine and with errands in between. We’ve ran through our budget and reviewed our expenses over and over again just to make sure we have enough to cover the mortgage. While it is exciting to think about acquiring a new home, it’s similarly daunting to see your already costly overhead blow up some more. BAM! Additionally, we navigated through the second week with the boys’ school exams so I don’t really know how we survived!
Thursday last week, I locked myself in the bathroom and bawled my eyes out. For the first time, I just felt really really tired. I still am, up to now, look how I lazily used “really really tired” to describe the feeling. Haha! Aside from the house woes, work hasn’t been too kind as well. I don’t want to elaborate on it, but there’s a kind of “tired with work” that makes you feel enveloped in sheets at night, and there’s another kind where you wake up every two hours. Unfortunately, it has been the latter for me – coupled with migraine and some throwing up with icky bodily fluids at some random times of the day because of stress. And of course, missing my Physical Therapy sessions and Ortho appointments.
Other would say I am still lucky (bless your evil souls, you gaslighters) that I have a job and even have money to get a house. But what they do not see and fail to understand is this invisible load I am carrying. And I bet it is not only me, but a lot of mothers out there who looks after a family, does the mental math of finances, who’s underperforming her 8-5 (because she worries about her kids and her home while she’s away), who has not fully recovered from an accident, or maybe looks after a set of senior citizens too. I don’t know, mothers really just have a longer to-do lists. But I thank the good souls who just listen and tell me to “hang on” cause I am really barely hanging so thank you for reminding to keep going everyday. HAHAHA.
While I know things would not change overnight, I still hope that whatever this is will get better. After all, dragons are supposedly lucky this year, right? Right? Cheers! JK. Cannot have alcohol yet.
between black and white 