KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE

When life becomes overwhelming

We’ve all reached what we believed was our maximum capacity—when life becomes harder than we ever expected or imagined.

Life can be full of merciless, subsequent losses, griefs, disappointments, stresses, bewilderments. The cumulative experience is difficult to express to those around us, and can then add to the pile of it all an existential loneliness as well. Until you’ve been in a season like that, you truly can’t understand it.

Then sometimes, somehow, it gets even harder, and harder again, beyond our previous maximum perceived thresholds. And every new threshold feels like a new impossibility we can’t survive.

But somehow we do.

The capacity of a human being to endure is sometimes shockingly remarkable.

It’s a real experience of emotional exhaustion, burnout, and a sense of things being truly overwhelming. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re experiencing that right now.

When there are no clear answers

I don’t have easy answers for you in a time like that, as much as I wish I did.

The truth is that sometimes life does not really have answers. Sometimes the reality is that life is just very hard, and all that can be done is to endure in this impossible way, surviving one day, one moment at a time. There is gold in the muck—I promise you, somewhere—but in the midst of the worst is not likely when you’ll be able to mine it. That mining of the experience will come later, in the form of depth, wisdom, and a deeper experience of joy and reality, made possible by the suffering, but it’s not usually particularly helpful in the moment.

Making things slightly less unbearable

In the meantime, you likely just need some immediate relief to signal to your body, mind, and heart that you still have some fight in you, and that you’ve got a life worth living on the other side of the wreckage.

In a time like this, everything in you will likely fight and say little actions won’t make a difference, and you will need to call on your heroic agency to begin.

One paradigm that helps shift things is to not think of trying to make things “good” exactly but rather to try to make them less bad. Somehow, that seems more reasonable to a discouraged mind.

Yes, you may still be crying about a serious loss intermittently throughout the day, but it will feel a bit more tolerable with some light on your skin and a showered body.

The main principle is don’t underestimate the little things, as much as you want to, and don’t be afraid to try to minimally reduce the misery in the ways that are in your reach.

Accepting the reality of suffering

First, start with a frank acknowledgment that It’s hard—even too hard—and you don’t have to pretend it’s not. You aren’t crazy: life is just sometimes brutal. The Christian perspective is that it’s a “valley of tears” here. The peaks of life are wonderful and beautiful, and we should try to focus on them and enjoy them, but this side of heaven, it’s always going to be a battle.

You’re not inadequate or unwell for experiencing suffering, especially in response to stark realities like poverty, sickness, stress, relational breakdown, and death.

You are human.

This alone, perhaps counterintuitively, can bring some relief. Acceptance of and alignment with what is can be useful.

Small actions that help when life feels too hard

Next, do some simple thing you have access to. Step outside for a few minutes, or if it’s cold peer through a window, and breathe with the sunlight in your eyes and on your skin.

Wash a few dishes.

Take a short walk around the block or do some stretching. Even 5 minutes is enough to cue to yourself you’re still in the game, that you have some movement and forward direction.

(I also have a theory that there is a connection with EMDR therapy here with the eye movements, forward motion, and our ability to process things this way.)

Eat or drink one healthy thing your body needs. Not everything—just one thing.

Take a quick shower, paying attention to the feeling of the water. Get clean.

Put some perfume on or smell something you love, intentionally. Be connected a bit more with your senses.

If you take care of your body, even in a small way, there will be some sense of overflow to a bit of well-being.

The quiet relief of connection

Finally, don’t underestimate a little time with a friend or group of friends. Yes, sometimes it helps to have someone to pour your heart out to and this is what we need. But sometimes, when life really is too hard, even just a bit of back and forth about not much, especially with a bit of laughter, can lift us up more than we’d anticipate. It can take us from being entrenched in hopelessness into a place of possibility. It reminds us we aren’t as alone as we may feel, and that we are loved.

There really is power in love, but also just in pleasant distraction.

All of these things—and I’m sure you can imagine more—seem like they won’t solve the problem. The truth is they won’t.

But they might make today tolerable, and sometimes that’s all we need to keep going until the light bursts through again.

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One final thing I think is a serious balm in the midst of these times we all go through is finding art and music that reaches past the conscious language of the brain via melodies and poetic lyrics.

These transcend our immediate moment and experience and instead reach the heart, meeting us at the deepest, wordless place of our pain.

I wrote this song for someone I knew struggling brutally with chronic sorrow and despair, also written from a deep familiarity with my own grief and disappointments:

If you’re navigating a season where life feels overwhelming, there’s more of this for you inside my private archive.

If you’d like to hear them, you’re more than welcome there.

Access to the private archive is complimentary and sent by email.

It includes my ongoing writing and occasional invitations to be more deeply involved—made possible by generous patrons.