Sometimes Life is Hard Just Because It Is

Thoughts about acceptance and healing on this rainy California day

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Just because something is hard it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve done something wrong.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you weren’t prepared.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you weren’t responsible.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you needed to do more.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you needed to know more.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you needed to try harder.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you weren’t enough.

Sometimes no matter what we do life is just hard. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with what you did. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you.

It just means that life is hard sometimes. It just is.

And sometimes the best way to cope when life’s circumstances are hard, is to just accept how hard it all is rather than blame yourself or hold on to anger and resentment.

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Being a therapist is funny job. Sometimes I find myself in a parallel process with my clients. It’s not that I’m always going through the exact same thing that my clients are going through, but for a decent amount of the time I find myself going through a similar theme that they are in my own personal life.

Something that I’ve been seeing lately is a lot of people being in circumstances that they, simply, don’t want to be in. They set a goal and they haven’t quite achieved it. Or, they met their goal but the result isn’t what they hoped for.

Life just happened. Things happened outside of their control and they’re now finding themselves in a place that the opposite of what they’ve intended.

So there’s worry, there’s anxiety, there’s frustration, there’s anger… and, underneath it all, there’s sadness and grief. So much grief over what has been lost. So much grief over what has ended. So much grief over not quite having the experience that one had hoped for.

These observations have led me to start reflecting more on my own experience. Getting pregnant and having my son with a smooth pregnancy and delivery, only to have a nightmare of a postpartum experience, which happened because I, as I ultimately discovered on my own, was extremely iron deficient.

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There was so much worry and anxiety that I had back then because I knew in my body that something was seriously wrong. Today there are still lingering bits of frustration and anger over what I experienced. Anger and frustration over the multiple providers I visited with who didn’t help me after I had to drag myself out the door to visit them because of the extreme exhaustion. Anger and frustration over hearing so many people tell me “It’s normal to be tired after having a baby” even though I knew what I was feeling was so above and beyond just being “tired”. Anger and frustration over my OBGYN who couldn’t offer anything more than an SSRI and birth control pills, which I knew was definitely not going to help me in such a fragile, vulnerable state. Anger and frustration over the fact that I had to do my own digging into my own tests to discover that I had an absolute iron deficiency and that I had to treat it myself.

Then there is the grief and sadness of it all. Grief and sadness over what my little family had to go through while I was in the worst of my iron deficiency. Grief and sadness over all the horrible physical symptoms that I had to go through. And grief and sadness over feeling like my postpartum recovery was “robbed” from me in some way. That because I wasn’t given the proper support early postpartum (in this case, by getting enough iron to replenish from the pregnancy and birth), I struggled to have the capacity to enjoy my son during the first two years of his life. I was so much in survival mode because of this nutrient deficiency that there were many times where I could hardly care for myself, let alone another human being who was dependent on me.

Coincidentally, I have been noticing that the longer my ferritin levels are at an optimal level (at this point over 125), the easier it seems to be for me to process what happened and let go of all these emotions. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because there’s some biochemical process that’s able to happen that couldn’t happen before. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to let go of things when you are no longer in the worst of your struggles and actually feel better. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to heal emotionally when you’re nutritionally nourished. There’s many possibilities.

But what I know for sure is that right now it’s easier to give myself grace for going through a horrible experience. It’s easier to be in a place of “they can’t know what they haven’t been taught” with all the providers who couldn’t help me. It’s easier to accept what happened and move on.

Sometimes life it just hard despite all of our efforts to try to avoid it. Sometimes healthcare providers don’t have the proper training to help you with what you’re struggling with. Sometimes you have to tell your health into your own hands. And sometimes, in doing so, you get to the other side and it’s finally better.

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So about iron deficiency…

Because I struggled so much with iron deficiency, I have since been trying to channel any lingering emotions from that experience into making more people aware of the condition. Right now, most healthcare providers are only educated on anemia, which is different from iron deficiency. You can be iron deficient, but not anemic, but if you are anemic you are (most of the time) iron deficient. The main resource that helped me is The Iron Protocol, which is an advocacy group for iron deficiency. Their protocol is based on treatment recommendations from the American Society of Hematology and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Iron is the most common nutrient deficiency worldwide. Some common symptoms include (but are not limited to):

• Chronic fatigue

• Insomnia

• Hair loss

• Anxiety/panic attacks

• Depression

• Cold hands and feet

• Exercise intolerance

• Heart palpitations

• Dizziness/lightheadedness

• Brain fog/trouble concentrating

• Derealization/feeling “spacey” or “out of it”

• Burning feet

• And more

  If you have any of these symptoms and suspect iron deficiency (especially if you are born female), please check out the above resources and get your ferritin levels checked with a full iron panel. You don’t need to suffer.

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