Regulation is often described as an internal process.
Breathing. Pausing. Managing reactions. Learning how to settle yourself from the inside.
Some of my regulation does work that way.
But not all of it.
Life, for me, doesn’t move forward because things improve or resolve in the way people often expect. It doesn’t return to something familiar. It doesn’t erase what changed.
It doesn’t resolve cleanly or all at once.
It resolves in pieces, and sometimes only for a while.
There are moments when I accept, again, that my children are gone, and that I have to go on. And not only that I have to, but that I choose to. That choice feels like its own kind of resolve. Not permanent. Not stabilizing forever. But real in the moment it’s made.
Life continues around those moments.
Not always heroically, but sometimes.
Not always as progress, but sometimes.
And sometimes it’s simply practical.
There are days that work.
They aren’t easy days, exactly. They still require attention and adjustment. But they don’t collapse under their own weight. They don’t ask more than I have to give.
That’s what I mean by workable.
Workable means my nervous system stays mostly where it is instead of constantly tipping into overload. It means the cost of living doesn’t exceed the capacity I wake up with. It means I can move through the day without bracing for impact the entire time.
This wasn’t something I achieved all at once. It wasn’t a mindset shift or a breakthrough. It emerged slowly, in part through the work of writing these essays, as the truth I was circling became clearer. And now I’m learning how to live inside that truth.
I don’t spend much time trying to make things feel good. I spend more time trying to make sure they don’t feel worse than they need to. That change alone altered the texture of my days.
Some things that once felt urgent no longer do. Some expectations fell away without being replaced. Some problems stopped demanding solutions once I stopped treating them as failures.
Life didn’t become lighter. It became simpler.
There is still grief here. Still limitation. Still days when everything costs more than I expect. But those days no longer mean what they used to. They aren’t evidence that I’m backsliding or doing something wrong.
They’re just days.
What surprises me is that this kind of living doesn’t feel like giving up. It feels like accuracy. Like responding to what’s actually possible.
I don’t live with a sense of constant hope. I live with a steadiness that comes from knowing what I can carry, and when.
Life doesn’t need to improve in order to be livable. It just needs to stay within the limits of the body that’s living it.
Mine does, more often now than it used to.
That does feel like a victory. And it is a lesson, even if it’s one I’m still learning how to live inside of.
It’s the shape my life has started taking.
And it works.
