Hero

I had a really rough day at work, and throughout my day there seemed to be a number of people who didn't have the time or the consideration to understand my point of view. I did my best to speak my truth, and while that's something I can feel proud of myself for, there was no getting away from the discomfort.

After work, I tried to deal with it as productively as I could. I stopped myself from going too far down the road of lamenting that I wasn't heading home to a supportive partner. Nope, I told myself, that's not part of today's experience. I cried. I talked to a friend. I did the things I needed to do to take care of my children. And I thought about how to talk to them about how I was feeling.

I decided to go with explaining how I felt about what had happened. They empathized. My daughter said that she thought one thing that would be hard about having kids is even when you have a bad day, you still have to take care of them. She really gets it, and I appreciated her nailing how I was feeling. I told them if they didn't mind, after dinner, I was going to try to just kind of take the night off.

I ended up watching a movie I read about in the New Yorker a while back: Boyhood. It's incredible. It's shot over a period of like 10 years as the actors grew up. It's not easy to watch at times -- there are some abusive alcoholic scenes that are very tense. But overall, it's a pretty beautiful story about how life doesn't necessarily work out the way you want it to or think it will. And the best you can do is to be true to yourself, love your people as well as you can, and enjoy the ride.

This is one of the main songs from the movie:

Let me go
I don't wanna be your hero
I don't wanna be your big man
I just wanna fight with everyone else

Your masquerade
I don't wanna be a part of your parade
Everyone deserves a chance to
Walk with everyone else

While holding down
A job to keep my girl around
And maybe buy me some new strings
And her a night out on the weekend

And we can whisper things
Secrets from our American dreams
Baby needs some protection
But I'm a kid like everyone else

So let me go
I don't wanna be your hero
I don't wanna be your big man
I just wanna fight like everyone else

And it feels like a pretty good song to mark this tough day, a day that, as many do, is pushing me to figure out how to be true to myself so that I can both enjoy my own life as much as possible and set the best possible example for my children...