After the Worst Has Already Happened

You know that exact second when the worst has already happened, the chaos dips for a minute, and you are just left standing in the middle of a room? It is a physical sensation and feels like someone dropped a concrete block right on your chest and forgot to take it off.

Every single nerve ending in your body tells you to move. Your brain starts screaming at you to find a project, clean a counter, pack a box, check your emails, or grab your phone. You are completely addicted to the hustle of trying to outrun your own life. You think if you can just keep your hands moving, if you can just stay organized and look like you're handling it, maybe the reality won’t actually catch up to you.

But staying busy can be a cheap mask for panic too. Sometimes it's just a desperate lie you tell yourself so you don’t have to look at the wreckage on the floor.

And when your world cracks open, whether you lose a person you love or a piece of your identity just disappears, the pressure to put your armor back on is suffocating. That's when people love to tell you how strong you are. They look at you with that sad, sympathetic squint and praise you for holding it together, for keeping your head up, for being a rock.

So you play the part.

You put on the brave face, you tell everyone you’re managing, and force yourself to keep producing because you’re terrified that if you slow down for even a second, you’ll completely fall apart. You treat grief and transition like a problem to solve instead of something you have to live through.

Stopping to actually look at what is broken is one of the hardest things a person can do. Because it means giving up the illusion that you’re still in control and letting the tears fall down your face without immediately reaching for a tissue to clean yourself up or trying to pull yourself back together. Just sitting on the floor surrounded by things that hurt to look at and admitting you don’t know what comes next.

There isn’t a manual for this. Nobody can hand you a checklist that makes it hurt less. You just have to let the wave hit you. It's chaotic, messy, and every part of you will feel like you are failing because it hurts so bad.

But that is also where you realize something.

You breathe through another second, even when the air feels too thick. You admit out loud that everything feels shattered right now. Yet somehow you realize that despite what happened, the ground doesn’t open beneath you.

It isn’t about finding some lesson in the middle of a tragedy. Because sometimes there isn’t one. It's just standing still in your own life exactly as it is, even when every part of you wants to run.

And later, when you’re ready, you move. The pain is still there, but life slowly starts asking something of you again. Folding a shirt. Washing a dish. Answering one email. The difference is that you aren’t using those things to outrun what hurts. You’re simply learning how to carry both at the same time.

The mind has a strange habit of returning to the same place, even when it knows there’s nothing waiting there. I don’t think we’re meant to understand every loss. So many things happen and they never make sense. Yet we keep looking anyway. Over time, some questions simply become part of the life we keep living.
– Annam M. Gordon