Why The Future Doesn't Help Me Now

A lot of people told me during the divorce that things were going to be a lot better in just a few more weeks or months or years. If I just got through *this part* then I was going to be really happy with the part that came after.

I tried to believe these people. At least, I tried for a while. But it took a lot longer than even my wildest estimates and it cost more both in numbers and in terms of my energy and my mental health. I’m not sure that it was clear that I was going to ever get to the other side of this. I’m not always sure that I’m glad that I got here, either.

Mostly, I want to try to explain kindly to people who say that it’s going to get better that IT DOESN’T MATTER. The future is not now. I cannot buy food with money I will have in the future. I can’t drive a car I will have next year. I can’t make myself feel secure with promises that may or may not ever come to pass.

Also can I just say that you have no idea what will happen in my future. Even if you have faced something similar to what I have, you still don’t know. No one knows. Because it is the future.

What it ends up feeling like is you telling me that it’s not that bad, that I should stop feeling so bad right now because my worries are really small and childish.

I remember another (male) parent telling me years ago that he got tired of hearing his kids complain about their problems. Because childhood friendships and elementary school grades and falling off your bike as a kid and hating your siblings—those were childish things that wouldn’t matter to you when you were an adult. So how could he take them seriously, even when his kids did?

But I had been told so many times as a kid that my childhood problems didn’t matter to adults that I had vowed to myself that I would never treat any child’s problems like that. To me, even as a parent, my kids’ problems were as real to me as they were to them. Adult problems come with adult capacities. And, well, money. Kid problems are in many ways MORE real and more difficult because they can’t be solved in adult ways, only in kid ways. Most adults have forgotten this, but I tried hard not to.

Today’s problems are the only real problems for me. Whatever solutions that the future finds, those aren’t solutions for now. I may learn to live with the problems in the future. I may stop caring about those problems. But that doesn’t actually change how I feel about them now. I can’t just snap a finger and make myself not care anymore. That’s not how it works.

Maybe you just mean to give me some hope, not to dismiss my pain. Hope is sometimes a good thing. But it’s also sometimes a painful thing. Because it’s not real, and you can’t depend on hope.