New Chapters ◦ Chapter One: The Break ◦ Entry 2
When a life breaks open, the damage isn’t always loud. There’s no single moment where everything collapses at once. More often, it’s a quiet narrowing. A slow rearranging of what fits inside a day, inside a body, inside a mind.
After my entire life shifted, my life grew smaller. The days narrowed into logistics and repetition. Get the kids where they needed to be. Show up to work. Answer what absolutely had to be answered. Everything else fell away quietly, without ceremony.
I stopped going to book club. Then the second one. I didn’t explain or announce it. I just stopped showing up. The meetings continued without me. The group texts kept buzzing until eventually my name simply wasn’t part of the rhythm anymore. It felt easier to disappear than to sit in a circle talking about stories when my own felt like it had slipped out of my hands.
I ignored messages more often than I answered them. I canceled plans and stopped making new ones. Being around people whose lives still looked intact made something in me ache in ways I didn’t yet have language for. I didn’t want to explain myself. I didn’t want questions. I didn’t want to be seen trying to hold together something that no longer felt like a whole life.
Around the same time, parts of my family went quiet too. Not the kind of quiet that comes from distance or busy schedules, but the kind that feels deliberate. Invitations stopped. Group chats disappeared. News traveled without reaching me. A wedding came and went, and I wasn’t even invited. It might have felt like nothing to them, but to me, the silence felt like erasure, like being edited out of a story I thought I still belonged to.
When I was already stretched thin, that absence landed heavier than I expected. It taught me something I wasn’t ready to learn yet: that some connections I thought were permanent were thinner than I believed, and easier to lose than I ever imagined.
My world kept shrinking.
I stopped caring for my body the way I once had. After my gastric bypass in 2021, I had worked hard to protect the progress I’d made, to stay mindful of what I ate and how I moved. But during this season, that attention faded. Weight crept back slowly at first, then faster, until it felt like one more thing I didn’t have the energy to manage. Food became automatic instead of intentional. Movement became optional instead of grounding. I wasn’t making active choices so much as letting the days carry me wherever they wanted to go. It wasn’t rebellion or indulgence. It was numbness. It was fatigue. It was the quiet surrender that happens when you’re too tired to keep steering.
Some days I barely recognized myself. Not in the mirror, and not in the way I moved through the world. I had always been someone who made plans, tracked progress, noticed patterns, cared about momentum. Now everything felt stalled and blurry. The future didn’t look like something you build. It looked like something you endure.
My life had compressed into a handful of predictable loops. Work. Home. Kids. Repeat. The rest of the world felt distant, like something happening on the other side of glass. I wasn’t deeply sad every day. I wasn’t constantly crying or dramatic about it. It was quieter than that. Flatter. A low-grade grief humming under everything, so steady it started to feel normal.
I didn’t feel broken enough to collapse completely. But I didn’t feel alive enough to call this living either.
I was still standing. Still functioning. Still showing up in all the places that required it. But inside, something essential had gone quiet. Not gone exactly, just muted beneath the noise of logistics and survival.
That was the season I lived in. Not the moment of impact, and not the beginning of recovery. Just the long middle. The aftermath. The part where everything looks intact from the outside, but nothing feels settled on the inside yet.
My life wasn’t centered anymore. It ran along the edges. Smaller. Narrower. Compressed into routines and obligations and survival math. I moved through my days like someone scribbling in the margins of a page that used to belong fully to her. Still present. Still legible. Just no longer taking up the main space of the story.
This post is part of my New Chapters series — personal essays about rebuilding, resilience, and writing what comes next. Visit the New Chapters landing page to explore the full series and read it in order.
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