I Hope Life Gets Softer on Us
Life just has a way of throwing us off our feet, and honestly, sometimes I think we deserve better.
We deserve better from this life, from this world. We deserve all the peace, love, happiness, kindness, and beautiful things life has to offer. Not just occasionally, not just when we’ve worked hard enough to earn them, but simply because we are human beings trying to make the best of the lives we’ve been given.
Life can be exhausting in ways that are difficult to explain. Sometimes, it’s the people we love, sometimes, it’s the things we’re trying so hard to achieve and sometimes, it’s the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next, the disappointment of things not working out, or even the quiet frustration of feeling like we’re trying our best but still not quite where we want to be.
And sometimes, it’s everything happening at once. 🙂
I think about how much we give of ourselves every day. The love, the time, the effort, the sacrifices, the hopes we carry, and the things we do even when we barely have enough energy for ourselves. We pour our hearts into people, relationships, dreams, responsibilities, and the lives we’re trying to build, hoping that somewhere along the way, we’ll find the same goodness we’re putting out into the world.
But that doesn’t always happen.
Sometimes, we give so much and receive so little in return. Sometimes, we work hard for things that don’t work out, we lose people, miss opportunities, question our decisions, and find ourselves trying to make sense of things we never expected to experience, and sometimes, even when nothing particularly terrible is happening, life just feels heavy.
It’s exhausting to keep showing up when you’re tired. To keep trying when you’re discouraged. To keep being hopeful when things don’t seem to be going your way. And it’s even harder when you feel like you have to keep it all together because life doesn’t exactly pause to give you time to catch your breath.
Sometimes, I think we underestimate how much it takes to simply keep going.
But even with all of this, I don’t want to stop believing in good things.
I don’t want the disappointments I’ve experienced, or the ones that may still come, to turn me into someone who no longer believes in love, happiness, kindness, or the possibility of a beautiful life. I don’t want the world to make me so guarded that I can no longer appreciate the good in it. I don’t want to become so used to struggling that peace feels unfamiliar when it finally finds me.
Because I believe we deserve better than a life that feels like one long struggle. We deserve to experience joy without constantly waiting for something to go wrong. We deserve love that doesn’t leave us questioning our worth, relationships where effort goes both ways, opportunities that remind us our hard work isn’t wasted, and moments that make us grateful to be alive.
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We deserve to feel good about our lives while we’re still figuring them out.
And I think that’s something worth remembering. We don’t have to wait until everything is perfect before we allow ourselves to experience happiness. We don’t have to have every part of our lives figured out before we deserve peace. We can be a work in progress and still deserve beautiful things. We can be tired, uncertain, disappointed, and hopeful all at once.
So, no, I don’t want to give up on myself. I don’t want to stop hoping, growing, loving, or believing that there’s more to life than the things that have hurt me. I want to keep making room for good things, even when life gives me reasons to be afraid of disappointment.
I want to find my peace. I want to experience genuine love, happiness that doesn’t come with constant pain, and the kind of fulfilment that makes all the difficult days feel a little less heavy. I want to look at my life someday and feel grateful for where I’ve ended up, even if the journey there looks nothing like I imagined.
And I hope the same for everyone who’s trying their best, even when their best doesn’t seem to be enough.
I hope life gets kinder to us. I hope the things we’ve been working towards begin to fall into place. I hope we find people who love us as genuinely as we love them. I hope we get opportunities we never thought we’d have, reasons to smile on days when smiling feels difficult, and moments of peace that remind us life isn’t always going to feel this hard.
And maybe, one day, we’ll look back at these versions of ourselves and understand how much it took to get through certain seasons of our lives. Maybe we’ll realise that even when we felt lost, we were still growing. Even when we felt disappointed, there was still room for something good to happen. Even when we were tired of trying, our stories weren’t over.
Until then, I hope we’re gentle with ourselves. I hope we allow ourselves to rest without feeling guilty, to feel our feelings without judging ourselves, and to acknowledge that sometimes, life is simply a lot to deal with.
We don’t have to pretend everything is fine all the time. We don’t have to turn every disappointment into a lesson or find a silver lining in every difficult experience. Sometimes, we can admit that things hurt, that we’re tired, and that we wish life would be a little kinder to us.
And still, we can hope.
I hope we get to experience all the good things we deserve from this world. I hope we find the peace, love, happiness, and fulfilment we’ve been searching for. I hope that, in the middle of everything we’re trying to figure out, life gives us reasons to believe that things can get better.
I hope life gets softer on us.
And more than anything, I hope we get to enjoy the beautiful lives we’re all trying, in our own different ways, to build.
