Seriously, you’re still here?

It is the middle of August 2026…I just reread my last post, which was my manifesto for the year. And what I hear in those words is my desire and desperation to be healed and out of survival mode.

I want it so badly. I want a life again. I want to feel happy again. I want to know who that person is looking back at me in the mirror.

I haven’t written since that day, or completed the series I had hoped to create, because that’s grief. That’s the healing journey I get to be on. It just doesn’t go the way I think it is supposed to go.

I seem to think that if I say it out loud, or in this case write it publicly, that somehow it will manifest in my life and become my truth. Like maybe putting the words out into the world will finally make them real. But then I get sucked right back into my life and my unconscious pain and trauma – the things I have internalized for the past 11 years, and the fears that have slowly grown into the normalcy of my everyday life.

This is what has a hold of me. These are the patterns of my life since Pat died; really, since Pat first got sick. I have been lost in this haze for so long that I don’t know how to find my way out anymore. It has become just the way it is. And I am ashamed to say that I think, in some ways, I have become comfortable in all of it.

Comfortable in the sense that I am terrified of stepping out of it – not that I enjoy it. Because there is nothing I want more than to have a life again and feel like me again.

I hate saying that out loud because it is embarrassing that I am still trying to figure this out after all this time. Eleven years feels like I should know better. Like I should have figured something out by now. Like I should be further along.

But the truth is…I’m not.

In many ways, life is good. Especially from the outside and at surface level. I get by. I’m doing okay. But there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t want more. I go round and round in my head and battle myself and my thoughts about how to get unstuck. But I am truly at a loss on how to do it.

People look at me and see someone who is doing good. She has a job. A house. Three healthy boys. I keep up on my bills. I have a boyfriend. I am out and about. I show up. I function. It looks pretty normal to the outside world. But on the inside, I am so lost and confused and unsure of everything.

I am not happy in my place in this world. I don’t like how my life is going, or where I am at. I know there is more to life, and I want more, but I am also afraid to do anything about it. I feel like if I set down even one of the million balls that I have in the air at one time, everything will come crashing down around me.

So I just keep juggling them all.

Even though they aren’t working for me anymore. I don’t even know what I am truly afraid of… I am afraid of losing everything again I guess – my hopes, my dreams, my goals. Maybe that’s why I don’t really have them anymore. I wish for them, but deep down I don’t think it’s honestly going to happen for me. It only happens for other people…not me.

Pathetic as I say that. But it is the truth. I don’t really understand what I am doing anymore. And when I say anymore, I mean the last decade of my life. So much time I have wasted just going through the motions. When Pat first died, I literally did just go through the motions to keep things afloat. I didn’t know any other way to survive. There were kids who needed me. There was a life that somehow had to keep moving even though mine had completely stopped.

Going through the motions saved me then. But as time passed, I just became comfortable with it all. It started to feel safer to keep going through the motions and not risk anything. Don’t hope too much. Don’t dream too big. Don’t want too much. Don’t put too much on the line because I already know what it feels like to lose everything I thought my life was going to be.

And maybe somewhere along the way, surviving stopped being something I was doing and became the way I was living. And it has led me right here, right now. And I honestly feel awful.

I was working with a student yesterday who was struggling with worrying about things so far down the road that she had no control over at this time. She was so paralyzed by the fear of what was to come that she couldn’t even enjoy the day she was actually living.

I listened to myself as I was telling her to go home and let herself feel how awful she was feeling. Cry. Scream. Punch a pillow. Do whatever it took to feel her pain. And then get up today and say, “OK. Enough. I’m done.” And start taking the steps needed to help herself. And when I heard those words coming out of my mouth, I knew I was talking to myself.

Nobody is coming to save me. I have to save myself. I am the one in control of my future, my opportunities and my path in life. I have to focus the same amount of attention and love and compassion that I give everyone else onto me. It has to be about me at this point or I am just going to disappear.

I have always said Pat’s illness wasn’t about me. After his death, it was about the kids, not me. I had to take care of them in those moments. They needed me, and I needed to make sure they survived something no child should ever have had to survive. But now…Now is different. I am losing myself. And it has to be about me. I have to take a step out of this grief comfort zone and step back into the world.

I honestly believed that at 11 years out from Pat’s death, I would be in a much different place in my life. I never thought grief would have become a friend who has overstayed their welcome. And lately I find myself looking at grief like that friend who somehow never got the hint that it was time to leave.

Seriously, you’re still here?

After all these years. After everything I have done to keep moving. After raising the boys and working and loving and laughing and traveling and showing up day after day. You’re still here. And of course you are. Because grief doesn’t leave just because enough years have passed. It doesn’t pack its bags because everyone else thinks we should be okay by now. It changes. It gets quieter. It hides in different places. Sometimes it sits quietly in the corner and lets me live, and sometimes I turn around and realize it has taken over the entire room again.

I know grief will always be a part of my life. I know there will never be a version of me that doesn’t carry Pat, his illness, his death and everything that came after it. But I have to find a smaller place for grief to stay within me before it consumes me whole.

It can live here. It just can’t be allowed to take up the whole house anymore.

As you can tell, I don’t really have any answers. I am starting to think there really aren’t any answers when it comes to grief and healing. Maybe that is something I have been getting wrong all along. Maybe healing isn’t finally reaching some magical place where everything makes sense and I suddenly feel like myself again. Maybe there isn’t a finish line. Maybe we are all just floundering, doing our best to navigate this new world that was handed to us without a manual or directions of any sort. Maybe some days we move forward and some days we fall right back into the places we thought we had already left behind.

And maybe that doesn’t mean we failed. Maybe it just means this is hard.

So I am going to try yet again. Not because I suddenly have it figured out. Not because writing this means tomorrow morning I am going to wake up healed, fearless and ready to take on the world. I know myself better than that. I am simply making the statement, yet again, that I am going to start finding a baby step out of this uncomfortable comfort that I have been living in.

One baby step…And then maybe another.

I don’t know where they will lead me. I don’t know what my life is supposed to look like from here. I don’t even really know who I am trying to become. I just know I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left merely surviving a life that I am still here to live.

So I am saying it again – I am going to find my way.

And if you are reading this and any part of you is thinking, Seriously, you’re still here too? whether you’re talking to your grief, your trauma, your fear, your survival mode, or the version of yourself you thought you would have left behind by now, maybe this is your sign too.

Maybe that’s how we find our way out of this uncomfortable comfort we have been living in. Not all at once. Not without fear. Not without grief.

Just one baby step at a time. So if you’re here too, take one with me…

What is your baby step going to be?