This week, I’ve been wrestling with bitterness.

There are things I want to be doing with my life that feel like they’re on hold until after surgery/recovery. Surgery is only a couple of months away, but with six weeks of recovery time tacked on to that, it’ll be nearly the end of the year before I’ll really be able to do anything to move things along. And that feels really distant, even if I know that really, it’s only a handful of months.

Feeling stuck has me feeling bitter, which adds to the general lack of motivation I’ve been struggling with in the past few weeks.

I don’t want to be a bitter person. For one thing, it’s a colossal waste of energy, and energy is not something I typically have a surplus of. And it’s just generally unpleasant. I try to be pretty happy and easy-going, and bitterness throws a wrench in that.

I’m not entirely sure what to do about it, though, aside from continually reminding myself that this, too, shall pass. I’m doing whatever research I can ahead of time, but I can’t tell if that’s actually helping or is just making me more stressed out about not being able to do anything with what I learn.

In the midst of feeling stuck, though, I’m also feeling extraordinarily grateful for friends who make me laugh and can take me out of my head for a while. Over the weekend we had the chance to cheer one of our friends on to victory at CLLAW, which was super fun. The next day, some other friends joined us for our second viewing of Ghostbusters, which was followed by bowling, which I hadn’t done in years. Bowling is one of those activities that I’m usually pretty terrible at, but it reminds me to laugh at myself and that it’s possible to have fun with something even if it’s not a thing I’m good at. (Case in point: my score of the last game almost doubled my score of the first game. I never broke 100.)

And that might be the secret to beating the bitterness: taking time out as often as I can to have a little fun with the people who remind me that there’s more to life than the parts that feel tedious.