I have been trying to find my way back into the world.
Not all at once. Not loudly. Not in some polished, inspirational, “look how healed I am” kind of way.
Just honestly.
For a long time, I have stayed quiet because quiet felt safer. I have stayed home because home felt safer. I have carried things I did not know how to explain, and I have let other people’s versions of me exist because I did not have the strength to correct them.
But I am trying to release some of it now.
To come out of my shell.
To build myself back into someone I can recognize.
Writing is part of that.
Not because I want to relive it.
Because I am tired of letting it live in me with nowhere to go.
There is a version of me that existed before all of this.
She cooked big meals.
She hosted holidays.
She remembered recipes without thinking.
She held a big, messy, beautiful family together and believed, deeply, that love was something you expanded, not divided.
I miss her sometimes.
August will mark two years since everything changed.
And I don’t say that lightly.
It Started With a Diagnosis That Doesn’t Give You Time to Think
When my daughter, Kendra, got sick, it wasn’t gradual.
It wasn’t something we could prepare for.
It was catastrophic.
Necrotizing fasciitis.
I spent seven weeks living at her bedside in Boston.
I am a North Country woman. We don’t do Boston unless we have to, but suddenly, I was navigating those city streets alone. My life became a grueling, mechanical loop.
This was my reality every single day:
- 3:00 AM: Wake up and start my “day job.” I worked in the quiet of the early morning just to keep the bills paid and the lights on.
- 10:30 AM: Walk to the hospital. For seven weeks, I learned to navigate those streets safely on my own, a solitary figure moving between a temporary home and a crisis.
- 11:00 AM – Dinner: At her bedside. Watching. Waiting. Advocating. Processing medical jargon that felt like a foreign language.
- Evening: The walk back alone.
- Night: Back at the computer. Checking emails. Working a bit more to catch up. Falling into bed only to have the 3:00 AM alarm trigger the cycle all over again.
I wasn’t visiting Boston. I was holding a life together with both hands while my own body started to fray at the edges. When people talk about priorities during that time, they are talking about a version of me that didn’t exist. That version of me was buried under my hospital cafeteria trays and the terror of losing my child.
All of this while not knowing if my daughter would wake up from life support, and then if she would even survive.
And even when she did… the crisis didn’t end.
It became:
- Dozens of surgeries
- Repeated sepsis
- Foot paralysis
- Deep vein thrombosis
- Wound care
- Physical therapy
- Wound vac smells and alarms
- Endless appointments
- Constant decision-making
- Financial management
- Insurance chasing
- Mental health struggles
And layered on top of that … trauma.
The kind tied to everything she had already endured, including domestic violence.
I became the one managing it all.
Not because I was the best person for it.
Because I was the one there.
While I Was Holding That, Everything Else Started Breaking
When Uncle Kevin died suddenly and unexpectedly on my 45th birthday, while I sat at my daughter’s bedside in a Level 1 trauma hospital four hours from home, it didn’t just devastate me.
It crushed me.
It was the straw.
And, it nearly broke my parents. They got the news that my dad’s twin had passed – a mile away from the hospital in Boston – a month after Kendra was admitted, during their one and only visit for my birthday – a trip they didn’t want to take. We North Country folk don’t “do” Boston unless we really, really have to.
A few days before, I called Mom hysterical because Kendra’s new colostomy bag was filling with blood clots; it was the first time I broke, really broke. And they knew the moment had come – they really, really had to drive into Boston.
Not long later came their fear of losing another brother.
Uncle Kurt was admitted to the ICU and nearly died from the same condition.
At the same time:
- My niece Emily was in and out of the hospital
- My aunt Rita was battling cancer
- I was trying to work to help pay the bills
- I was sending my youngest step son off to college
- I was drowning, and I was sick, but I pretended not to be.
At the end of September 2024, Kendra came home. That should have been a joyous and wonderful occasion. I was happy she was well enough to leave the hospital. But I was terrified to be alone in managing her care. Juggling the 16 prescriptions she left the hospital with. The follow-ups. The physical therapy. The wound vac. The gosh darn wound vac that would beep relentlessly at 2am to warn us it had lost its seal, and then the painful process of peeling away the old seal, cleaning the wound, and resealing everything – over, and over, and over…
October was filled with a lot, I’m sure. It is still a blur. November, more of the same.
Then December came.
My mom was admitted to the ICU with heart failure.
January.
My husband had a heart attack.
Between December and March, I had four major surgeries myself.
April.
Kendra went septic and was hospitalized again when her colostomy was reversed, and things, not surprisingly, didn’t go as planned.
Somewhere in all of that, my own body started demanding attention too.
Perimenopause did not arrive gently. It came in like someone kicked the door open, flipped the furniture, and left me standing in the middle of my own body wondering what the hell had happened.
Fistula. Intussusception. Rectocele. Diagnosis after diagnosis. Surgery after surgery. Pelvic floor physical therapy, because my own body had become another thing that needed managing.
My exhaustion got worse. My sense of identity crashed. My anxiety got louder. My body felt like it had been holding the line for everyone else for so long that it finally started sending its own emergency alerts.
And still, I kept trying to function like I was fine.
If I had not lived these two years myself, I would have trouble believing all of this happened to one family in one stretch of time.
But it did.
One thing after another.
No time to process one before the next one walked through the door.
This Is What Survival Actually Looks Like
It doesn’t look strong.
It looks like:
- Forgetting things you used to know
- Burning meals you’ve made for years
- Losing parts of yourself quietly
- Opting out of family gatherings
- Not being the first to reach out to anyone
- Burying yourself in work because it’s easier than life
I used to cook for everyone. That was my love language.
And suddenly, I couldn’t.
Eventually, I stopped trying.
Not because I didn’t care.
Because I didn’t have anything left.
And it was not just cooking.
I miss reading books without rereading the same page five times.
I miss taking walks because I wanted to, not because I was trying to outrun my own nervous system.
I miss working out and feeling connected to my body instead of suspicious of it.
I miss going to shows.
I miss visiting people just for the sake of visiting, without needing three days to mentally prepare and three more to recover.
I miss walking into a gathering and feeling like myself.
Now, when I host something or show up at a party, I sometimes feel like an imposter wearing the skin of the woman I used to be.
I know what I am supposed to do. Smile. Hug people. Make food. Ask questions. Laugh at the right moments. Move through the room like I remember how.
But inside, I am often watching myself from somewhere far away, wondering when being a person started to feel like a performance.
Some days, breathing was the goal.
Other days, I just needed the nightmare to stop.
Not because I wanted to disappear.
Because I was exhausted beyond anything I had ever known.
I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize the woman looking back. There are lines etched into my face that weren’t there two years ago … maps of hospital hallways, 2:00 AM alarms, and the sheer weight of holding my breath for months on end.
This trauma isn’t just in my head; it’s written on my skin.
And it is still written into my days.
I wish I could say I climbed out of survival mode and stayed out, but that would not be true.
Some part of me is still stuck in the broken cycle.
The social anxiety.
The need to be alone with my thoughts.
The constant search for a quiet space where nobody needs anything from me, nobody is disappointed in me, and nothing is beeping at 2:00 AM.
But then, the second I find that blank space, I fill it.
- A project.
- A list.
- A plan.
- A responsibility.
- A farm task.
- A work deadline.
- A family problem.
A page full of things to do that would overwhelm all the elves in the North Pole.
It is almost funny, except it is not.
I am constantly trying to create peace and then immediately crowding it with proof that I am still useful.
Still productive.
Still needed.
Still not falling apart.
That is the part of survival people do not always understand. Sometimes the crisis ends before your nervous system gets the memo.
Your body is home, but your brain is still walking back from the hospital.
You are safe, technically.
But quiet feels suspicious.
Rest feels irresponsible.
An empty calendar feels like a trap.
So you keep moving.
You keep making lists.
You keep filling the silence, even though silence is the very thing you are desperate for.
And Still… Life Didn’t Pause
We moved.
We rebuilt.
We tried to create stability again.
But almost a year after Kendra’s illness, a family conflict boiled over into chaos.
For two months, I felt separated from two of my grandkids and from their mom, who had been my rock for so long.
I do not even know how to explain what that did to me.
It was not only the loss of access. It was the sudden silence where love, routine, and safety had been.
It was grief on top of grief. Fear on top of fear. One more reminder that even when the emergency ends, life can still find new ways to knock the breath out of you.
We eventually found our way back to each other, and I am deeply grateful for that.
Having that closeness back in my life is one of the pieces of healing I do not take for granted.
But not everything came back with us.
While one family conflict was being repaired, another was building.
And if I am being honest, that one had been building long before it finally broke.
Because from the outside… it looked like choices
Who we saw.
Where we went.
What we prioritized.
But inside our lives?
It was capacity.
We weren’t choosing people.
We were trying not to collapse.
The people who truly had access to me refused to stand behind the doors I’d closed. They didn’t wait for an invitation I didn’t have the strength to send; they invited themselves into the wreckage and stayed.
To the people who did that: thank you.
Thank you for not making me perform wellness before you offered love. Thank you for checking in without keeping score. Thank you for understanding that silence was not rejection. Thank you for helping me remember that I was still worth reaching for, even when I had disappeared into survival.
Others were close by and seemed to experience my distance as an insult.
That is a special kind of grief.
Being close enough for people to know you were drowning, but still being judged for not swimming toward them.
Sometimes… You Become the Story
There is a strange kind of pain in being turned into the explanation.
The reason.
The influence.
The problem.
It is easier to assign blame than to sit in complexity.
Easier to say, “This is because of her,” than to look honestly at everything that actually happened or to reflect on misplaced anger, blame, resentment …
I will not pretend that did not hurt.
It did.
It hurt to be misunderstood while I was barely surviving.
It hurt to feel cast as the villain in a story that had so many moving parts: decades of history that predated me, so much grief, so much fear, and so much exhaustion.
It hurt to know that I was carrying hospital trauma, caregiving trauma, financial stress, family loss, medical crisis, and my own failing body, while other people were deciding my distance meant something ugly.
It hurt to feel judged for being overwhelmed, especially by people who knew what it meant to carry heavy things too.
I know other families carry impossible things. I know caregiving can be brutal in more than one direction at once. But pain is not a competition, and trauma does not cancel itself out because someone else has suffered too.
My daughter unexpectedly went on life support at 23 years old. I spent a week not knowing if she would wake up, and then nearly two months not knowing if she would survive.
That changes a mother.
That changes a nervous system.
And I am done apologizing for being changed by it.
It hurt to wonder whether some people I loved as family ever truly saw me that way in return.
Or maybe they did once, and pain rewrote the story. I may never really know.
It hurt to be blamed inside a story that was much bigger and older than me. And that kind of hurt does not disappear just because you choose not to fight about it publicly.
But I have learned something.
Not every story told about you is yours to carry.
- Some stories are just people trying to make sense of their own pain.
- Some stories are people protecting themselves from a more complicated truth.
- Some stories are easier to tell if someone else becomes the problem.
That does not make them true.
And it does not mean I have to pick them up.
I Still Think About Reaching Out
I do.
There are people I still think about.
People I still wish well.
People I still love in the quiet, complicated way you can love someone from a distance.
But there is a kind of vulnerability in wishing someone well when they have already decided you are the problem.
That does not feel like kindness.
It feels like exposure.
So sometimes, I stay quiet.
Not out of anger.
Not out of indifference.
Out of protection.
I am learning to be more careful about the spaces I enter. I need invitation. I need safety. And sometimes, even when both are there, I still need time.
But the harder truth is that sometimes even safe spaces do not feel safe to me right now.
Sometimes I know I am welcome.
Sometimes I know I am loved.
Sometimes I even want to go.
And still, I cannot bring myself to walk through the door.
There is a cloud of anxiety that follows me now. It settles around ordinary things: family gatherings, social events, road trips, and plans I would have said yes to without thinking before all of this happened.
I do not show up to things I used to show up for.
I do not travel the way I used to.
Most days, I hardly leave home. And when I do, it is often because someone else needs me to, or because I am trying to make someone else happy, not because I actually want to go.
That is a hard thing to admit, because it can look like rejection from the outside.
But from the inside, it feels like my nervous system is still standing guard at a hospital door somewhere, waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
So if I have seemed distant, please understand:
Distance has not always meant disinterest. Sometimes it has meant survival.
Sometimes it has meant anxiety.
Sometimes it has meant exhaustion.
Sometimes it has meant I used every ounce of myself on survival and had nothing left for showing up beautifully.
Sometimes it has meant I wanted to come, but could not make my body believe it was safe.
I am not avoiding life because I do not care.
I am trying to find my way back into it without abandoning myself again.
That may look like distance from the outside, but from the inside, it is discernment.
I spent too many years forcing myself into rooms, conversations, expectations, and family dynamics where my nervous system was screaming that I did not belong there. I do not do that anymore.
If I have to beg for a place, perform for approval, or prove that my pain was real before I am treated with care, then I know I need more distance.
Love should not require me to override every alarm in my body just to keep the peace.
Because I know what it cost me to survive those years.
And I know what it would cost me to keep explaining myself to people who are not ready to understand me.
Because Peace Matters Now
Some doors do not stay closed because you do not care.
They stay closed because opening them would cost you your peace.
And after everything, I have learned that peace is not something you give away just to make other people comfortable.
I spent too long abandoning myself to keep things together.
Too long trying to be the bridge.
The cook.
The host.
The fixer.
The one who understood.
The one who absorbed.
The one who kept loving bigger, even when it meant making myself smaller.
I cannot do that anymore.
I still believe love should expand.
But I no longer believe it should require self-abandonment.
That is the difference.
That is the lesson survival burned into me.
What I Know Now
I did not fail anyone.
I carried what I had to carry.
I showed up when I could.
I made decisions in impossible circumstances.
I loved through exhaustion.
I advocated through fear.
I worked when I should have been sleeping.
I kept going when I had nothing left to give.
And I am still here.
Not the same.
But still here.
There is a version of me that existed before all of this.
I miss her sometimes.
But I am learning to stop treating her like the only version of me worth loving.
This version is tired.
This version has boundaries.
This version does not cook for everyone anymore.
This version knows that silence can be survival.
This version knows that peace is not selfish.
This version knows that being misunderstood is painful, but abandoning yourself to be understood is worse.
And maybe that is the truth no one talks about:
Surviving does not make you cold.
It teaches you the difference between
love… and self-abandonment.
I am still learning how to come back into the world.
Slowly.
Carefully.
In ways that make sense to the person I am now.
And still, the hits keep coming.
I wish healing meant the world agreed to stop throwing things for a while. It does not.
I am still carrying family losses that are too tender and too complicated to lay out here.
Uncle Paul passed away two months ago. Gram went into the hospital weeks later. Aunt Rita is still dealing with post-cancer complications and another major surgery. My niece lost her port, and her struggles with IV access are not just inconvenient; they are dangerous. My brother-in-law is having health complications.
It is a strange thing to be healing while the ground is still moving.
Some days it feels like my family is made of glass. I look at my parents now and see how human they are. How fragile. How much I need them. How much I fear the day life asks me to survive losing them too.
That fear can make love feel unbearable.
But maybe that is the lesson I keep circling.
To have a family and to love them deeply is to agree to live with risk.
It is to walk around with pieces of your heart outside your body, knowing you cannot protect all of them all the time.
Love is pain, sometimes.
Not because love is wrong.
Because love attaches us to people we cannot keep safe forever.
But I am trying to learn the difference between being broken by every impact and building better shocks.
The hits keep coming.
But I am not only bracing anymore.
I am learning how to absorb, how to bend, how to recover, how to keep loving without letting fear turn my whole life into a waiting room.
Maybe that is why I keep finding my way toward things with purpose.
EMS. School. The farm. Environmental science. Conservation law. Learning how to become a better steward of the land beneath my feet.
It may seem strange that someone who barely leaves home sometimes can climb into an ambulance, go back to school, or build a farm life rooted in responsibility and restoration.
But in a way, it makes sense to me.
These things give me doors to walk through with a purpose. A role. A reason.
And yes, I know myself well enough to know I am probably still overfilling my cup.
Sometimes purpose is healing.
Sometimes it is avoidance with better branding.
Most days, it is probably a little of both.
But I am learning to notice the difference. I am learning that rebuilding a life does not mean filling every empty space until there is no room to breathe. It means choosing what actually brings me back to myself.
EMS lets me show up in a crisis without having to be the hostess, the bridge, or the person who makes everyone comfortable.
School gives me a future to work toward.
The farm gives me something living to tend.
The land reminds me that healing is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is slow, seasonal, muddy, and stubborn.
None of it asks me to pretend I am the old version of myself.
It is not about escaping the people I love. It is about finding doorways back to myself so I can return with more of me intact.
Not to become who I was before.
Not to perform the old version of me so everyone else feels better.
But to become someone who can love deeply without disappearing inside it.
