Have you ever reached a point in life where everything just feels dry? Like your dreams are on life support, your hope is running on fumes, and part of you just wants to pack it in?
I’m not talking about dying. I’m talking about giving up.
And not the beautiful kind of surrender that says, “I can release this and trust that everything will work out.” I’m talking about the kind of giving up that says, “Stick a fork in me. I’m DONE.”
I’m tired, disappointed, angry, and frustrated. And if we’re being honest, I suspect we’ve all been there.
Even those of us who stand on stages talking about hope, joy, resilience, self-worth, and connecting with our inner knowing have seasons when those things seem elusive.
Sometimes life looks an awful lot like the two hanging flower baskets in my backyard.
Let me explain.
I bought two gorgeous hanging baskets bursting with flowers and color. They were practically showing off, and every time I looked into my backyard, I smiled.
I took such good care of them, too! I watered them faithfully, admired their beauty, and made sure they had everything they needed to flourish.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? When something is beautiful, when it’s working, when it’s giving us joy, we’re naturally drawn to nurture it. (Note to self.)
Then I went away for almost four weeks. A friend kindly cared for my plants while I was gone, and when I returned, everything was fine.
But I wasn’t.
Some deeply disappointing personal and professional experiences had knocked the wind out of my sails. I was still functioning, still working, and still showing up, but something inside me felt depleted.
And those beautiful hanging baskets? I couldn’t bring myself to tend to them.
In fact, I stopped going into the backyard altogether because I didn’t want to see what had become of them. I knew it would only depress me.
Unfortunately, my laundry room is in the backyard, and eventually, clean underwear becomes a necessity.
So out I went, and there they were. Brown, crusty, dry as bones. What had once been a riot of color looked like a collection of dead sticks.
Honestly, they seemed like a pretty accurate representation of my interior life.
The Sunday I Almost Threw Them Away
Sundays are laundry day at my house. They’re also take-out-the-trash day because the garbage trucks arrive early Monday morning.
A couple of weeks ago, I looked at those pitiful baskets and thought, “Why am I keeping these? They’re dead. I should just throw them away.”
But something inside me nudged: What if you just gave them a little care? Maybe they could come back.
I wasn’t optimistic. For the record, I don’t have a green thumb. I love flowers, but gardening isn’t exactly my happy place.
Still, I began pulling away the parts that were clearly dead, and then I watered what remained, even though it was brown and looked hopeless.
The next day, I watered again. And I kept doing it, not because I felt particularly inspired or believed some miraculous transformation was underway, but because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, life was still happening, and I was still trying to make sense of some things that had shaken me more deeply than I’d expected.
The Hard Work of Healing
This has been a season of deep honesty for me. I’ve discovered that some things I thought I’d healed were actually just wounds I’d covered with Band-Aids. Now I’m feeling emotions connected to hurts and disappointments that reach all the way back to childhood.
It’s uncomfortable and exhausting, and sometimes it’s downright painful.
Someone once told me that doing this kind of inner work would be the hardest work I’d ever do. At the time, I didn’t understand what they meant.
Boy, do I understand now.
The interesting thing about deep healing is that real life doesn’t stop to accommodate your tears.
The bills still need to be paid, the meetings still happen, and the deadlines don’t disappear just because you’re having a particularly difficult day.
There’s also the sometimes painful reality that, at the end of the day, I’m the one responsible for taking care of me.
So I keep going. I take the meetings, stand on the stages, network, and smile. And I try to make that smile genuine because one thing I’ve learned is that pretending your way through life doesn’t work.
But sometimes, when I return home to the quiet of my solitary life, the familiar clouds roll back in, and so do the tears.
I used to despise crying because I thought tears were a sign of weakness. Now I understand that they’re one of the ways my body releases stress and processes what’s happening inside. I’ve become less interested in judging my emotions and more willing to let them have their say.
And it occurred to me that my interior life and my backyard had something in common. Both were in a watering season.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Maybe there are times when we need to stop expecting ourselves to produce something beautiful and simply concentrate on caring for what’s still alive.
And Then, Something Happened
I’m writing this on a Sunday morning.
Earlier today, I stumbled into the backyard, turned on the hose, and let the sunshine hit my face. As I looked down at those hanging baskets, I realized something had changed.
They’re not bursting with flowers. Not yet.
But they’re green! Beautiful, glorious green. There are tiny leaves and new growth where, just a couple of weeks ago, I could barely see anything worth saving.
They’re coming back to life.
And I nearly cried because I realized that all those days I was watering, even when I couldn’t see anything happening, something was happening.
I wonder if the same might be true of me.
Maybe all this difficult interior work is doing something I can’t yet see.
Maybe the tears, the honesty, the uncomfortable realizations, and the daily decision to keep showing up are nourishing something that hasn’t quite broken through the surface.
I don’t know for sure. But looking at those baskets this morning made me wonder.
Don’t Stop in Missouri
I’ve used this analogy before, but it bears repeating.
If you’re driving from Pennsylvania to California, you don’t stop in Missouri, look around, and announce, “Well, I guess I’m never getting to California!”
Of course not. You recognize that you’re simply not there yet, and you keep driving.
But here’s the part that’s easy to forget when we’re in the middle of a difficult season: There may be beautiful things along the way. Unexpected adventures, interesting people, moments of laughter, and glimpses of grace that we would miss entirely if we were so fixated on the fact that we hadn’t reached our destination.
I know how easy it is to mistake the middle of a story for its ending, especially when the middle isn’t turning out the way we hoped.
There’s a scripture that cautions us not to judge anything before its time. I think that includes ourselves.
We’re works in progress, and just because something isn’t blooming today doesn’t mean it never will.
Who Gets to Decide You’re Worth Watering?
Here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about.
Sometimes people decide we’re no longer worth the effort. Maybe we disappoint them, maybe we don’t fit into their plans, or maybe they simply don’t have the capacity or desire to nurture a relationship with us anymore.
And suddenly, we find ourselves in the trash bin of someone else’s life, waiting for Monday morning pickup.
Ouch.
But someone else’s decision to stop watering you doesn’t mean you’ve stopped being worthy of care.
That’s an important distinction, and one I think many of us struggle to remember when we’re hurting. We can so easily interpret another person’s choices as a verdict on our value, when the truth is that their decision belongs to them and our worth was never theirs to determine.
Not everyone will choose to stay in our lives, and sometimes we’re the ones who have to make the difficult decision to walk away. That’s part of being human.
But we still get to choose what we do with our one beautiful, irreplaceable life.
And I’m beginning to think that sometimes the most courageous choice isn’t some grand declaration of victory or an inspiring leap into a new chapter. Sometimes it’s simply deciding that, even though we’re tired and disappointed and don’t have much evidence that things are going to get better, we’re going to keep tending to ourselves anyway.
Maybe that means making the appointment you’ve been putting off, taking a walk, saying a prayer, or allowing yourself to cry without feeling ashamed. Maybe it means resting without guilt or reaching out to someone who loves you.
Or maybe it’s just getting out of bed and deciding you’re not going to give up on yourself today.
You don’t have to be blooming to be worthy of care.
And you don’t have to feel hopeful to do something that gives hope a chance.
So get that watering can out, my friend. Keep tending to the things that matter, especially your own heart.
It’s still beating, which means there’s still hope.
As for my hanging baskets, they’re not quite what they used to be, and I don’t know whether they’ll ever look exactly the same.
But they’re alive.
And looking at them this morning, I realized something about my own life.
I’m almost hopeful to see what blooms.