When you start to feel like things should have been better this year

I have shared this a thousand times by now, but I have never shared the story of how I felt when I wrote it. It was a quiet November night, my husband was working late, and I was sitting in our one bedroom apartment alone. Emotionally, I was alright. Nothing crazy was going on and it felt like an ordinary night. Then, my mind was suddenly flooded with all of the times I had failed. These thoughts were entirely out of nowhere. This was 2016 when there had been a huge transition in my [music] career. Overall, I had been at peace, but on that night, everything just hit me. I’m not one to cry very much, but in that moment I felt that I might actually burst of the tears I had perhaps been holding in. But as I sat there, certain I was on the brink of an overdue watershed, to my surprise, not a single tear fell from my eye. I thought I was about to start weeping, but before I knew it, I had picked up my pen and I had started writing. When I writr, I am almost always writing for someone else, but when I look back on that night, I know I needed those words for myself. I didn’t even proofread it when I wrote it and I almost didn’t even write my name at the bottom. I took a picture of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to share it like I would normally share something I wrote on Instagram or Facebook. So instead, I tucked it away on Pinterest thinking no one would ever see it. And oh, how I was wrong. A year later, it has been pinned and repinned hundreds of thousands and times and now, I have lost count. I have also lost count of the number of times I have fallen into grace. I don’t deserve it, but yet still, it finds me, over and over again. This year was not like last year, but it was still hard. There were many mountains and valleys, but I am still here and you are still here too and there is so much to each of us than our yesterdays. — Morgan Harper Nichols