By Helene Waters

There are drafts sitting in my WordPress account that I sometimes forget about.

This was one of them.

I wrote it at a time when I was trying to make sense of what happens when life changes dramatically, but the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge that it has happened.

I didn’t know when I wrote it that I’d eventually come back to it on a Saturday morning when several enormous changes would land almost simultaneously.

On Friday, my mum moved out of the compound we’ve lived in together for six years.

My daughter leaves for university today.

Work has changed. Good changes but still huge changes.

Someone I love is in considerable pain.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I’m trying to remember that I’m seventeen days into quitting smoking and that my nervous system probably doesn’t need me demanding that it perform emotional gymnastics as well.

So perhaps this is the week this particular draft stopped being a draft.

Because sometimes you don’t choose the blog post.

The blog post chooses you.

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There is something profoundly offensive about the world continuing normally while your life is actively falling apart.

Truly.

Your entire emotional infrastructure can collapse overnight and somehow society still expects things like:

• passwords
• groceries
• professionalism
• bras
• remembering why you walked into the kitchen

People still say things like: “Just checking in!” while your nervous system is essentially a raccoon trapped in a wheelie bin.

The sun rises.

Traffic continues.

Children still need lifts to school.

The dog drops his ball at your feet in the hopeful belief that you might somehow muster enough energy to throw it for him.

And the cats continue bringing in whatever ungodly creature they have discovered outside like tiny furry emissaries of chaos.

And meanwhile, internally, you feel as though somebody detonated a grenade inside your sense of reality.

One of the strangest parts of grief, trauma, heartbreak, chronic illness, betrayal, burnout, or major life change is discovering how little the outside world actually pauses for human devastation.

Not because people are cruel necessarily.

Mostly because everyone is carrying something.

Which is comforting in a deeply depressing sort of way.

You expect collapse to feel dramatic.

You imagine moments deserving of an Oscar:

Staring out rainy windows, life-changing revelations, beautiful orchestral music swelling meaningfully in the background.

Instead, real emotional breakdowns tend to happen while:

• unloading shopping
• replying “Kind regards” through emotional ruin
• standing in pharmacies
• pretending you understand school WhatsApp groups
• or crying because somebody used your good scissors for cardboard

It’s strange how incredibly fragile change can make us feel, yet somehow we’re still expected to calculate what we owe the taxman…

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The Quicksand Phase

For a long time after something breaks inside your life, it can feel like you are trapped in emotional quicksand.

Everybody else appears to be moving forward normally.

Meanwhile you are celebrating achievements like:

• showering voluntarily
• answering messages before the third business day
• and eating food that required actual preparation instead of simply opening a packet with despair

You begin questioning yourself too.

“Why am I not over this yet?” “Why does everybody else seem fine?” “Why am I still stuck here?”

But healing is deceptive.

Because from the inside, survival often feels like failure.

Especially in a culture obsessed with productivity, resilience, and inspirational nonsense printed in cursive fonts.

People love stories about overcoming adversity.

What they do not enjoy nearly as much is witnessing adversity in real time.

Especially the slow versions.

The inconvenient versions.

The versions where someone is technically functioning while internally held together by caffeine, obligation, and what feels like bubblegum and a prayer.

And because you are still getting up every day, people assume you are coping better than you actually are.

Sometimes you assume that too.

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The Strange Reality of Growth

And then something strange starts happening in the most inconspicuous of ways.

There’s absolutely nothing dramatic about it.

There’s no fanfare or motivational montage.

No sudden moment where you stand on a mountain, arms outstretched, breathing triumphantly as the hills come alive with the sound of music.

There’s no emotional breakthrough.

Real growth is usually far less impressive.

It happens while paying bills.

While folding laundry.

While realising you laughed at something properly for the first time in weeks or months even.

You start paying attention to what is actually on television instead of just staring at it like a mindless emotional support zombie.

You successfully wash the dishes and do not cry in the supermarket that day.

Progress.

And while the anxiety still exists, the sensation of an elephant sitting on your chest slowly starts feeling slightly less elephant-like and a little more baby-hippo-ish.

Still concerning.

But marginally less likely to crush you completely.

You begin adapting.

Not like a polished actor or actress.

And there’s no “Marilyn-Monroe-dress” moment either.

It’s more like a squirrel on crack learning how to operate increasingly complicated emotional machinery through trial and error.

You start recognising patterns faster.

You become more protective of your peace.

You notice who drains you.

Who comforts you.

Who only enjoys you when you are easy to consume.

You stop apologising quite so quickly.

Or at least you notice when you are doing it.

You become less willing to shrink yourself to keep others comfortable.

Not because you have become hardened.

But because survival eventually teaches you the cost of abandoning yourself repeatedly.

And one day, often unexpectedly, you look back.

Usually while doing something painfully ordinary, like folding washing or standing in a queue wondering why one person needs seventeen minutes to buy bananas.

And you realise:

You were moving the entire time.

Not in “Big Friendly Giant” steps.

But in millimetres.

Tiny emotional recalibrations.

Invisible acts of endurance.

Your world did move forward.

And so did you.

You became stronger in places that once collapsed easily.

Softer in places that once stayed guarded.

Clearer about what love actually looks like.

More honest about what exhaustion feels like.

You lost parts of yourself too.

That is the uncomfortable truth nobody advertises about healing.

Some versions of you do not survive difficult seasons.

But new parts emerge too.

Parts built from experience instead of innocence.

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The Myth of “Getting Back to Normal”

People often talk about “getting back to normal” after loss or trauma.

But I do not think we return unchanged from experiences that fundamentally alter us.

I think we rebuild.

And rebuilding is strange.

Because eventually your life starts functioning again.

You laugh properly.

You sleep better.

You make plans again.

You stop flinching every time your phone vibrates.

But the person rebuilding that life is not entirely the same person who first fell apart.

There is before.

And there is after.

And somewhere between those two versions of yourself, you slowly learn this:

Being stuck and healing can look almost identical from the outside.

Sometimes growth does not feel empowering.

Sometimes it feels exhausting.

Sometimes it feels like surviving things you were never supposed to carry alone.

But there is something strangely beautiful about realising that even in your most broken seasons…

your life was still moving forward.

Even when you could not feel it.

Even when all you could see was the quicksand.

And perhaps strength is not always loud.

Perhaps sometimes strength is simply: continuing.

While emotionally held together with instant coffee, dark humour, and the increasingly unstable belief that adulthood is a well-organised concept.

Which, quite frankly, it absolutely is not.

So yes, changes… I don’t like you but…

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