“Life only ever gives you as much as you can handle”

Life only ever gives you as much as you can handle. What a load of bollocks.

Apparently this frequently repeated saying actually stems from a misinterpretation of a line in the Old Testament. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I may have attended church every Sunday throughout my childhood but religion never stuck to me (my dear mother sighs at her “failure” in this regard). Thus I’ll leave discussion of the biblical origins of this concept to liturgical scholars to explore.

I can only speak from life experience. If God/life never gave us more than we could handle, my daughter would still be alive.

I get that people mean well when they say it. But what I also know is that telling someone that the reality they face wouldn’t be so if they couldn’t manage it doesn’t actually help. It suggests that, when we feel as though we are drowning in a black abyss, that somehow we are failing. Obviously, we should be able to handle this or we wouldn’t have been given these circumstances in the first place. That is utter rubbish.

I know many people who have been given far more pain and grief and sadness and hard stuff to deal with than anybody ever should.

Take Mr Neville-Lake, whose three children were killed in a horrible car crash and then, some years later, whose marriage fell apart. Can anyone blame him for giving up? He was handed more than anyone should be expected to handle.

The same goes for my beautiful Charlie. She spent years suffering from depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, followed by the extreme isolation of covid, and then realizing that she was transgender. Mental health supports in Ontario are woefully inadequate and she had more on her plate than any 16 year old should be asked to cope with. We miss her more than anything. But we don’t blame her for feeling that life had handed her too much.

Sometimes life does just give us more than we can bear. When people say to me “wow, I don’t know how you do it”, I actually appreciate that as an acknowledgment that this life I am living is a lot. Like a lot a lot. It’s been more than I could handle at times and, if I had to bear it alone, I guarantee that I wouldn’t still be here.

Together, my family is bearing it, mostly because we have each other, our families, friends, dogs, and therapists — and we weren’t given a choice. But it’s a lot. It’s bloody awful actually, losing a child/sister who had so much brilliance, wit, kindness, and immense potential. It’s every parent’s nightmare and worse than that.

We will get through this as a family but not because it’s not more than we can handle. It’s because we have too much that we can’t give up on and thus we will figure it all out, come hell or high water.

It’s also because I am determined to make something good out of these stinking rotten lemons we have been handed. I want to support both trans individuals and their families. I want to show the world how we can be better - starting by learning the difference between sex and gender. I want to inspire and help others by sharing my experiences. I can’t fix everything but I can try to leave this world a better place and, most of all, I can honour Charlie’s last wish that we do just that because, in her words, all she ever cared about was love, kindness, and social justice.

My family will continue to plod on, but for all the reasons I have shared here, not because it’s not more than we could handle individually. So let’s stop suggesting to people that all the crap they have been handed is only as much as they can handle. Let’s instead ask them how we can help to lighten the load they are carrying.