This Isn’t Strength — It’s Survival

I’m new to blogging. I don’t really know what you’re supposed to share and what’s “too much.” But today, my brain feels like a bag of cats and my chest feels like a lead balloon, so I’m going to write anyway.

People keep telling me, “You’re strong. You’ll figure it out. You always do.” And I get it. They mean well. But at this point, those words just feel like a license for everyone to walk away while I keep getting hit.

I didn’t just lose my mom. She had been getting sicker, but no one realized how close to the edge she was. One day she was up and mobile, and then suddenly she wasn’t. Overnight, she became bedridden. Hospice was called. Three weeks later, she was gone.

Everyone was stunned. Friends kept asking me what she died of, but I still don’t know. They called it “failure to thrive,” but what I saw was someone who had been through too many losses. Her husband, her brother, her best friend, her home, her business, and one family member after another. It was like the final round of a prize fight, and she just couldn’t keep her hands up anymore.

I lost her. Just like that, she was gone. And then, I made a decision.

After getting a kidney stone on Christmas Eve, spending that night in the ER, and catching COVID in the process, I hit my wall. I exposed someone without knowing it – I was sick and scared and felt completely alone.

And that was the moment. The silence, the sickness, the absence of my mother — it broke me. And I said, Forget it. I’m leaving. I’m moving to Spain.

So I did. A few months later, I was gone.

And a couple of years later, I lost almost everything I had built. Work I poured myself into disappeared overnight, leaving me cut off from the community and identity I thought I could count on. The savings I worked for evaporated faster than I ever imagined, and in the middle of it, I made financial decisions I regret. Choices that left me carrying more weight than I could handle.

With those losses went the future I envisioned for myself. The sense of safety, the security I thought I had, the desire to thrive.

I’m grieving, and it’s not one wave of grief that hits over and over. It’s several separate storms, creating waves that don’t stop. Waves that have swept me out so far that the shore is a sliver that rises and falls in between the cold and dark.

These weren’t just losses. They were violent and cruel losses. Like someone reached into the life I was building and tore it apart with both hands, on purpose.

So yeah, when people tell me I’m strong, I smile, but inside I’m screaming.

I didn’t move to Spain with nothing, but it certainly feels like that now.

I’m furious.
I’m heartbroken.
I’m exhausted.

…but I’m still here.
That’s not strength.
It’s survival.