Light in the Middle of the Mess

For a friend who needs to hear this, you know who you are:

I have a friend who has been put through the wringer these last few years. And I don’t mean a rough patch or a bad season. I mean the kind of stretch that just keeps stacking itself higher and heavier.

His health has been wildly out of control. Appointments blur together. Specialists contradict each other. Medications are prescribed, reactions happen, and somehow he’s still told it’s not possible, or that it’s “unlikely,” or that it’s all in his head. Imagine living in a body that keeps waving red flags while the people meant to help keep shrugging at them.

Today he called me after getting yet another piece of strange health news. Not devastating on its own, maybe, but added to an already overflowing pile, it felt like too much. Like the current bag of crap he’s been carrying wasn’t quite full enough, so the universe tossed in a little extra for good measure.

At one point he said, half joking and half exhausted, “Can you write about why one good thing happens and then three bad things follow?”

And honestly, I probably could. I could dig into the unfairness of it all. The imbalance. The way life sometimes seems to hand out wins with strings attached. But the truth is, that angle doesn’t come naturally to me. Ask my husband. He’ll be the first to tell you that my optimism can be… a lot. Annoyingly so, if you catch him on the wrong day.

It’s not that I don’t see the hard things. I do. I just don’t like to camp there.

What I wanted to say to my friend, and what I think he already knows deep down, is this: sometimes the bad doesn’t come in threes because you did something wrong or because the good thing needs to be “paid for.” Sometimes it’s just noise. Static. Life being wildly uncoordinated and unfair, all at once.

And sometimes the good thing wasn’t meant to cancel out the bad. Sometimes it was meant to remind you that good still exists in the middle of it.

When you’re drowning in appointments, test results, side effects, and second-guessing your own body, a single good thing can feel almost insulting. Like, thanks… but this doesn’t fix everything. And it doesn’t. It’s not supposed to. It’s just a small light saying, “You’re still here. This moment is still real. You’re not only the hard things happening to you.”

I don’t believe life keeps score the way we think it does. I don’t believe joy triggers punishment, or that hope invites disaster. I think we just notice the bad more when we’re already tired. When our resilience is thin and our patience is frayed, every new hit feels louder.

So no, I didn’t write him a piece about why three bad things follow one good thing.

Instead, I reminded him that he’s allowed to be angry. Allowed to be worn down. Allowed to say, “This is unfair,” without immediately following it up with a silver lining. Positivity doesn’t mean pretending it doesn’t hurt. It just means not letting the hurt be the only voice in the room.

And if being annoyingly positive means sitting with someone in their mess while quietly believing that their story isn’t done yet, I guess I’ll keep wearing that title proudly.

Even on the days when the bag feels too full to carry.