5 Things to Remember When Your Life Goes to Hell

My aunt Brenda was diagnosed with terminal cancer a few years ago, and she reacted exactly how you'd expect: denial, panic, fear -- all the natural emotions that humans go through when progressing through grief. Now, I don't want to bring you down, so before we go any further, here's Lexy and Stephany singing "This Feels Like Love."

Better? If not, watch it again. All of it. For the rest of you, let's skip ahead to when Brenda accepted her situation and made peace with it. Once that happened, she told me, "All of this is temporary. It sucks that I have cancer, but the problem is never the situation -- it's how we handle it." That really hit home for me because I never looked at it that way before. We are creatures who excel at adaptation, even when things are their most dire. Especially when they're the most dire. But the initial burst of panic and fear inhibits that perseverance ... and that is where the problem seems the worst.

When Brenda said that it's only temporary, she didn't mean that her cancer was going to suddenly decide to stop being a douche and leave with an apology. She meant that the chaos and negative emotions don't last very long. That once you're able to clear your heart and your head, these things become so much easier to deal with.

So two weeks ago when our car broke down like the asshole dick licker that it is, I had to remind myself that it's not the end of the world. It's a problem with a definite solution, and panicking isn't a part of that equation. Then a week later my wife needed all four of her wisdom teeth pulled and we had to deal with it all over again. Where's the money going to come from? How much is covered by insurance? The only day that's open at the dentist is the day of my article deadline. How in the living fuck are we going to handle this? Do I have to start selling crack? Again?

Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty Images

And that's where Brenda's foresight still helps me to this day. Her lesson reminds me, "Hey, dipshit. Calm down. Take a breath. This is fixable, but only after you get past the panic. You're solving nothing by freaking out. It's all temporary. Just be glad your mom didn't name you 'Brenda.'"

One of the most common replies I hear from someone who's just been used as an emotional dumping ground is "Hey, it could be worse." We hear it so much that sometimes we even say it to ourselves when shit hits the fan. And I'll be honest here -- if it helps ease your mind and gets you past the panic, then by all means continue saying it. But that doesn't mean that it comes without downsides.

Obviously, the problem could be worse. The airline pilot could decide to start up the jet right as you're fucking the engine. You could have just been runner-up in a game of "I Bet You Can't Stab My Chest." You could be Lexy and Stephany's manager:

More times than not, the problem I see with the phrase is when people use it to downplay their (or someone else's) current problem. "God, can this day get any worse? I have to come up with an extra hundred bucks to get my tire fixed. Rent is due. All the food in my fridge is covered in a glowing purple fungus ... OK, just take a deep breath. This could be worse. Let's just relax and get my mind off of it for a bit."

It's a means of delaying the problem until you're stable enough to handle it, and at first glance that sounds logical. But the problem is that normal humans actually need to go through those stages of grief as a process because grief isn't just a thing that happens when someone you love dies. It encompasses any loss, no matter how small. It's just hard to recognize that we're going through it sometimes because small losses generally mean a fast grieving process.

But think about the last time you had a problem with hotel reservations or a mix-up with your luggage at an airport or your stunt motorcycle suddenly petered out. For most of us, our initial reaction is telling the person behind the counter, "No, that can't be right. Check again." Or in the case of the bike, trying to kick start it 25 times in a row, knowing full well that it's not going to magically rumble to life and scale that flaming ramp. That's denial, and it's the first stage of grief. It's almost always followed by the rest of them, too. Anger that this bullshit is happening to you, and then acceptance.

Digital Vision./Digital Vision/Getty Images

Putting off that process only delays the part where you get past it and dive into finding solutions. "OK, let's take this one step at a time. Grenades won't help, so let's put those away. I fully plan on setting this place on fire later, but my lighter was in my bag. So I'll need to stop at the store ..."

Of course, if you're not careful, there's danger even in allowing yourself to go through those stages. So we have to remind ourselves that ...

It is so easy to forget in those moments that the other person is just as stressed as you over the disasters. And it's even easier to forget that even though you're only venting your frustrations to "get it out of your system," he or she can take it as "It's your fault that we're in this predicament! Why do you keep causing all this financial headache?!"

Even if they're not directly involved with the crisis, how often have you heard someone say, "Hey, don't take it out on me!" I couldn't even attempt to put a number to it.

It's in those times that you absolutely have to remember that you're talking to another human. And that human is processing everything you're venting. It's incredibly important that they understand that you're not mad at them. That sometimes, you just need someone to listen while you bitch. That sometimes, your venting means having to drop someone with a German suplex while screaming, "OOOOOH YEEAAAAH!"

Thinkstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images

But keep in mind what we talked about earlier. How at the beginning of the disaster, everything feels chaotic. You're panicking. Logic feels like an enemy. If you can help it at all, it's best to vent when that dust has settled a bit. If you've given yourself enough time to really wrap your head around the problem, you're going to sound a whole lot less like a frothing lunatic, and a lot more like someone who just needs to talk it out.

For the rest of us who get buried in that panic and chaos that I keep bringing up, there's a natural reaction to rebel against it or push back. This is where I consistently find myself when things are at their worst. There comes a point where the stress just piles too high and we give in under the pressure, declaring the problem "unfixable." I'm going to go back to my wife's wisdom teeth for a minute because it's a perfect example of how powerful this reaction can be.

Hers was not a simple case of "These things are growing in weird so we have to eventually pull them out of your headface." It was an emergency that had to be immediately addressed because she was a rare case of some fucked up nerve being in the wrong place -- so the more the teeth came in, the more pain she experienced. There was some infection involved, and it quickly became a case of "We have exactly one day open on the schedule to get you in here. This is not up for debate. Get here and be prepared for us to bitch slap those assholes right the hell out."

We also have shitty credit ... and even with insurance taking care of most of the bill, we still had to pay $200 up front before they'd even make the initial appointment. And another $800 before they'd do the surgery. I'm genuinely surprised I didn't hear the phrase "mandatory blow job" in their instructions.

Pixland/Pixland/Getty Images

But the point is that when she told me the news, I flipped out. In the ensuing panic, I told her, "There is absolutely no way we can do that. I don't know what to tell you, but we simply don't have that kind of money sitting around." I was stuck in that declaration until my mind calmed down enough to really give it some honest analysis. When I stopped pushing back, I realized that I did actually have a means of wrangling together the money that did not involve putting us into debt or giving a rim job to a mob boss.

And I see that all the time. Not just from me, but from many, many other people who find themselves sans umbrella in a urine typhoon. As a byproduct of blind panic, their gut reaction convinces them that the crisis is out of their control, and they just shut down all attempts at solving it. Yes, there are some that are beyond our ability to spank into submission. But more times than not, we can at the very least mold them into a more manageable shape. Even if it's changing the thing that life is trying to shove up our butt from a pine cone into a golf ball.

Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images

It's precisely the reason we roll our eyes at rich people when they bring up their own problems. To us, their personal disasters sound like a boner contest on a nude beach. But to them, it could easily feel on par with you losing your electricity.

The point is, there is no escaping it. The only thing you can do is learn how to deal with it when it does show up. That's not saying that you have to walk around every minute of the day expecting a demon to jump out of the shadows and hit you in the chest with a ball of flaming shit. I'm saying that when it does, you can't be surprised by it. Because he's always there. Always shitting. Always looking for new chests to stain.

Your job as a human is to understand that the longer you stand there and scream, the more the poop is going to set into your shirt. You didn't want it to happen, but it did. Now, what cleaner works best on demon turds? Probably that Lexy and Stephany video.

John is a columnist right here at Cracked with a new article every Thursday. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.