How do we move through the moments that undo us? As I write this, I’m not trying to solve anything, I just needed space to reflect, to make sense of what I’m feeling. Something in me is shifting, aching, asking to be noticed.
We have moments in our lives when everything familiar suddenly becomes distant, when the comfort we once held close slips quietly from our hands. This leaves us standing in a version of life we don’t recognize. It could be the end of a relationship, the loss of a dream, or simply the unraveling of what we thought would last.
Whatever the reason, the result feels the same: we’re left to carry ourselves through the unfamiliar.
That’s what makes being human both beautiful and hard. We have the capacity to feel deeply, connect, and create meaning beyond need or logic. But how do we move through these moments that trouble us and disrupt our inner peace without losing ourselves inside it?
I’ve watched friends try to navigate their pain. Some used anger like armor, some numbed themselves until they couldn’t feel joy, and others let it swallow them whole.
I’m somewhere in between. Anger doesn’t come naturally to me right now; it feels like it would betray what I actually feel. Yes, I could pretend, shout, or blame, but none of that helps me understand how to live with what’s left. I’ve tried distraction, work, movement— filling every minute has occasionally helped, but only temporarily.
People have told me,, “Time heals all wounds.” While I agree that, maybe, time will remedy everything, I don’t like surrendering control to time. It gives time too much power, stripping me of all autonomy over how I feel in this moment.
If I wait on time, I don’t get to decide how or when I reconcile.
That feels terrifying. So now, I try to stay still, try to just feel. But even that comes with the urge to escape.
I thought I could find escape inside hope, but even that has its own complications. Hoping for something better, for the future I desire and healing, feels like a disservice to the present moment. Sometimes, hope tries to tidy up what’s meant to be messy. It wants to smooth over what still needs to be fully felt.
So I stay here, in this space, letting the weight of questioning my future settle over me, and not trying to run from it or pretending it doesn’t exist. I still don’t understand how to get through it all without falling apart. I know that piecing myself back together will take more of me than it will to hold myself together. But maybe that’s what I have to do. Maybe I have to break and fall apart. Subsume a new form of being that allows me to feel all the worry in the world and still move through it.
I’ve realized so much more work goes into trying not to feel anything. It takes less work to just feel it all, no matter how overwhelming.
Maybe that is what life asks of us and what the whole of life becomes: an act of letting go.
Let go of all expectations of ourselves, our assumed timelines, and supposition for how we think we should feel inside these moments. Maybe we need to let go of the urge to repress, our constant attempts to place accountability onto other things like time, and forcing what we feel into hope.
Instead, what if we found ways to take ownership of our emotions, even the ones we didn’t ask for? What if we only have control of how we choose to move through it, not what happens itself? Perhaps, inside of this, we can find power.
I know that, if I feel this deeply about all the negative things in my life, it also means I can love just as deeply, finding joy to the same immense capacity. And that’s something I want to hold onto— not the hard moments themselves, but what it says about who I am.
