The Shape of After

If you’re reading this, you’ve already violated the spirit of what this is supposed to be.
This isn’t intended for consumption. It isn’t intended to help anyone. I’m not an expert on grief, resilience, mental health, or finding meaning in difficult circumstances. I have no wisdom to offer and no particular insight that isn’t already available in a thousand books written by people smarter than me.
This is for me.
Or at least that’s the theory.
A therapist recently suggested journaling. Apparently writing things down is supposed to help people process grief, identify patterns, challenge assumptions, or accomplish any number of other therapeutic goals. I don’t know if any of that is true. What I do know is that I can’t write nearly as fast as my brain thinks, so putting pen to paper feels more frustrating than helpful. Typing, on the other hand, has at least a fighting chance of keeping up.
So here we are.
The last couple of years have been difficult in ways that are both obvious and surprisingly hard to explain. Some losses are easy to identify. My mother died. My mentor and most trusted and stable daily connection retired. Relationships changed. Work changed. Plans changed. Assumptions I had about my future turned out to be wrong.
Other losses are harder to name.
Confidence. Resilience. Purpose. The ability to absorb criticism and move on. The belief that hard work reliably produces satisfaction. The certainty that if I just kept doing the right things, eventually everything would make sense. Basically everything that has served me forever is failing me now.
What I’ve learned is that life doesn’t always collapse in a dramatic moment. Sometimes it erodes. A little bit at a time. One disappointment. One loss. One change. One criticism. One realization that the future you imagined is no longer available to you. The death of possibility.
People often talk about grief as though it follows a trajectory. As though there is a direction of travel. As though every day gets a little better.
That hasn’t been my experience.
My experience has been that every day gets a little farther away from the life I had before. It’s a little bit worse all the time.
Some days that feels manageable. Some days it feels unbearable. Most days it just feels empty.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand whether what I’m feeling is grief, depression, burnout, loneliness, exhaustion, or some combination of all of them. I still don’t know the answer. I only know that whatever reserve of resilience I used to possess seems to have been depleted, and things that should roll off my back now land with surprising force. Every challenge and criticism feels like failure and daily failure is a soul crushing life.
The result is that I often find myself wondering what comes next.
Not in an inspirational sense. Not in a “new chapter” sense. Just literally: what comes next?
Because from where I’m sitting, the future feels less like an opportunity and more like a question mark. Or worse—not even a question, or a semi colon…just a period.
The purpose of this blog, if it has one, is simply to create a record. A record of what this experience feels like while I’m living it. Not the cleaned-up version years later. Not the version with lessons learned and tidy conclusions. Just the reality of it now.
I’ll pick a prompt, write for a few minutes every day, and see where it goes.
Maybe nothing comes of it.
Maybe it helps.
Maybe it becomes evidence that I genuinely tried all the things people suggest before concluding they don’t work.
What I do know is that I am standing on the far side of certainty, looking at a life I no longer recognize and trying to understand the shape of what comes after, or if there is an after.