The other day I was at Starbucks and a small boy about two years old was standing in the middle of the floor crying and saying “no, no.” He was so obviously distressed that his mother came over, scooped him up, and held him close, soothing him.

I envied that little boy.

Have you ever wished you could stand in the middle of wherever you were and cry? Let everyone know how distressed you really were?

I felt like that the past two weeks. Because of the terrible winter weather, several projects and meetings converged with a program I had been working on for months. Delayed deadlines and rescheduled appointments meant I was scrambling to get everything done in a compressed period of time.

It was grueling. By the day of my program, I was so mentally exhausted I could barely think straight. That also meant I had to work very, very hard to not let it show….which was even more exhausting. Inside, I was a two-year-old child crying and saying “No! Enough!”

As an adult, we can’t stand in the middle of wherever we are and cry out. But we do have one way to handle it. We can stop pretending that we are living effortless lives, and we can stop telling the people close to us, “everything is fine. Don’t worry about me.” We can tell the truth to the people who care about us. We can say, “hey, this has been a really, really hard week. It honestly has been brutal. I need your understanding.”

So while we probably won’t stand in the middle of Starbucks and sob loudly, we must find a way to talk to the people who love us and care about us. We must allow ourselves to be two years old again in our honest expression of what our life is really like. There are people who can pick us and soothe us. But we have to say the words.