Sometimes I get tired...

I got home from work this afternoon and settled into my chair to putter on Facebook for a bit before diving into the massive To Do List waiting for me.  I don't normally work Tuesdays, but we're at peak volume for the month and so I volunteered to work extra hours.  It was an all right morning, though I didn't sleep well last night between a restless husband and three restless cats taking turns waking me up, but I while there was a nearly overwhelming urge to just turn off the alarm and roll over, I made it in on time and was pretty productive.

I ran a couple of errands on the way home, looking forward to a little relaxation.  Life is so busy with working a day job, having my own business, and maintaining a marriage and a house that those free moments are to be cherished despite the endemic exhaustion surrounding them.

The exhaustion makes me more susceptible to negativity.  I try not to let it happen, but now and then things just get to me.  Such as the incident that happened today.

My Facebook feed was scrolling along, here a video of cute baby ducks, there a friend's visit with the WADF (Weird-Ass Dream Fairy), over there a request for help in finding an inexpensive wedding dress, then a few photos from DragonCon rolled by, and so on.  The usual items that I tend to see were about, nothing overly attention grabbing, really.  And then I saw a post that caught my eye.  It was a link to an article about a young man who identifies as female and whose school required him to remove his make-up so that he would appear male, and how the school is currently being sued regarding the issue.  I was about to click the link and check the article when a comment a few posts down on the thread caught my eye.

"It was probably some fat ugly woman who isn't happy in her life who complained..." the person writing the comment said.

My heart sank, and I felt a deep moment of hopelessness.  All of the work that we do trying to change the world, all of the efforts to get people to stop treating people's body size like an indicator of anything other than ...well...their body size, all of that struggle, it seems to be for nothing some days.  I get so tired sometimes of fighting the fight and trying to be heard.  People throw the insults and the hatred around so easily, without even really thinking about it, and they don't care.  Sometimes it seems like no one cares at all, and that any hope of changing the world so that people are taken for who they are inside rather than what they look like on the outside is so far out of our reach that it might as well remain an item for fictional worlds, it will never happen in reality.

Some days I believe in the goodness of people and the rightness of the world.  Some days I believe that fairness and intellect will eventually win out over meanness and bigotry, over willful ignorance and the inclination to raise the self up by stepping on others.  Some days I'm an optimist.

Other days, like today, I wonder why we even try, and I think that maybe I should just shut up, withdraw into my own little world, and not care any more.  Some days, like today, I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to be numb.  Some days I'm just really, really tired.