The Shape of After

One thing I want to be careful about with this blog is pretending I’ve reached conclusions that I haven’t.

The entire premise is that I’m writing from within the experience, not after it. I’m not documenting what hopelessness felt like. I’m documenting what it feels like. There’s a difference.

People often tell stories once they’ve survived them. They climb the mountain, make sense of what happened, find the lesson, and then write about the journey from the safety of the summit.

I’m not there.

At the moment, it feels less like I’ve climbed a mountain and more like I’m somewhere on the side of Everest wondering whether I packed enough oxygen.

So when I wrote in my first post that some days the future feels less like a question mark and more like a period, I meant it. Omitting that would make the writing more palatable, but it would also make it less honest. And if the point of this exercise is honesty with myself, then there isn’t much value in pretending otherwise.

One of the prompts I wanted to write about was this:

What have I lost besides my mother?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

I’ve lost certainty.

Not certainty that bad things happen. Everyone knows that. I’ve lost certainty about who I am, what I’m doing, where I’m going, and whether any of the things that have always motivated me still work.

I’ve lost confidence.

For most of my life I had a strong sense of myself. I wasn’t arrogant, but I knew what I was good at. I trusted my judgment. I could take criticism, decide whether it was fair, and move on.

Now every criticism feels true.

Every challenge feels personal.

Every disagreement feels like failure.

I can receive ten compliments and one criticism and believe only the criticism.

Objectively, I don’t think my value has changed. Rationally, I know that.

Emotionally, I no longer believe it.

I’ve lost resilience.

The reserve tank I used to draw from appears to be empty.

Things that would have bounced off me a few years ago now land with surprising force. Every difficult conversation feels sharper than it should. Every setback feels larger than it is. I understand intellectually that this isn’t entirely rational.

Understanding it doesn’t change it.

I’ve lost joy.

That one is harder to admit.

I can still function. I can still perform. I can still walk into a room, be charming, be competent, make people laugh, deliver presentations, carry responsibilities, and appear completely normal.

Most people would never know anything was wrong.

The exhausting part is that it used to be real.

I used to enjoy things.

I used to feel satisfaction from achievement. I used to feel energized by challenges. I used to genuinely enjoy being around people.

Now it often feels like I’m acting out a version of myself that I remember but no longer entirely recognize.

I’ve lost sleep.

This sounds trivial until it isn’t.

When you stop sleeping properly, everything becomes harder. Every problem feels bigger. Every emotion becomes heavier. Every thought becomes more difficult to sort through.

The world starts to feel slightly unreal.

I’ve lost the future I thought I was building.

I had a picture in my head of what life would look like.

Most people do.

Mine involved family nearby. A busy house. Shared holidays. More years than I ended up getting.

Life had other plans.

What remains bears very little resemblance to what I imagined.

I’ve lost relationships.

Not because anyone abandoned me.

If anything, I’ve done most of the retreating.

I tell myself I don’t want to burden people. Everyone has their own problems. Everyone is carrying something. Why should they have to carry mine too?

So I withdraw.

The irony is that isolation makes everything worse, and yet it remains my preferred strategy.

I’ve lost hope.

Or perhaps not entirely.

Maybe hope is simply buried under a great deal of exhaustion.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the things that sustained me for most of my life no longer seem capable of doing so.

Achievement doesn’t feel the way it used to.

Praise doesn’t feel the way it used to.

Success doesn’t feel the way it used to.

For most of my life, I wanted people to be proud of me.

I still do.

I suspect I always will.

The thought of disappointing someone I respect still makes me feel physically ill.

But even when approval comes, it no longer fills the space it once filled.

The space remains.

Empty.

And perhaps that is the loss underneath all the others.

Not confidence. Not certainty. Not joy.

Love.

The kind of love that exists before you’ve accomplished anything.

The kind of love that knows all your flaws and stays anyway.

The kind that roots for you automatically.

The kind that survives fights, mistakes, disappointments, and failures because it was never conditional in the first place.

The people who occupied that space in my life are gone.

Friends still matter. They matter enormously.

But there is a particular kind of permanence that comes with family, and once it is gone, the absence has a shape of its own.

Maybe that is why all these other losses hurt so much.

Because none of them happened alone.

They arrived together, piled on top of one another, until eventually I found myself looking around at a life I no longer recognize and wondering how many things can be lost before a person stops feeling like themselves.

I don’t know the answer.

I’m not writing from the other side of that question.

I’m writing from inside it.