Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded

by Hannah Hart

Buffering is that time you spend waiting for the pixels of your life to crystallize into a clearer picture; it’s a time of reflection, a time of pause, a time for regaining your composure or readjusting your course. We all have a limited amount of mental and emotional bandwidth, and some of life’s episodes take a long time to fully load.

I find another garbage bag on the ground with about five items in it. She must have tried to start the process on her own and stopped. I have to stop myself from picturing her down here alone, trying to throw away her lifetime, only unable to do so. Some might say that’s a good instinct. Maybe she’s been saving all this stuff for so long because she was waiting for her life to start back up again. Is that hope?

Milton says, “The mind can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.” I try remind myself daily that success and failure have less to do with actual results but rather how we choose to respond to the results. You can squander success and you can overcome failure.

But now I find comfort in seeking to understand the things that scare me instead of hiding from them.

It’s not superficial to care about the way you look. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the time spent on your appearance if that’s part of your self-care. People may use labels such as “vain” or “shallow” to try and keep you in a box, to make you feel small. But those people are usually just insecure themselves. Nobody else gets to tell you what you should or should not care about in terms of your looks. That’s something you get to decide all for yourself.

It takes strength to allow yourself to seek help. To seek allies. To get the support you need.