Living forward didn’t begin with a decision.
It began before there was language for what was happening.
My body moved through the earliest days without clarity or perspective. Things were done because they had to be done. Plans were made. Choices were made. But they happened in a kind of fog, carried more by continuation without consent than by understanding.
From the outside, that movement can look like resilience. It can look like coping, adapting, or even healing. But from the inside, it felt more like continuation without permission. Forward motion happened before I understood what it would require, and long before I could name what it was costing.
Living forward didn’t come with a map. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I was still here. Each step was taken without understanding the terrain ahead of it. I didn’t ask whether it would hold. I stepped, and then noticed afterward that it had.
I didn’t calculate the cost of continuing. I couldn’t have. The cost only becomes visible in hindsight, and sometimes not even then. At the time, it felt less like choosing and more like moving through instinct. I tested steps without naming them as tests. I noticed how they felt, adjusted slightly, and kept going.
From the outside, that kind of movement can look smooth. It can look intentional. It can even look like progress. But inside, it often felt tentative. Not fragile, exactly, but alert. As if I was learning how to distribute my weight differently, how to stay upright on ground that no longer behaved the way it used to.
This is where people often mistake living forward for recovery. They see motion and assume healing. They hear consistency and assume strength. But effort doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t leave visible markers. It just continues, quietly, day after day, without asking to be recognized.
At first, nothing made sense. My thoughts were scattered, my emotions disconnected, and I remember wondering if this confusion meant something inside me was breaking beyond repair. I didn’t recognize myself. I didn’t understand what I was feeling or why my mind couldn’t organize itself the way it used to. The fear wasn’t just the pain. It was the not knowing what was happening to me, or whether I would ever feel oriented again.
I know this state intimately because I’ve lived it before. After losing my son years ago, I moved through those early days without any reference points. I didn’t have language for the fog or the fragmentation. I didn’t know if what I was experiencing was normal, or if I was losing my grip on myself. That uncertainty added its own kind of torture.
Losing my daughter brought those sensations back in waves. The pain is just as intense. But this time, something was different. I recognized the confusion. I knew the fog for what it was. I understood, at least in part, what it was doing to my thoughts and emotions. And because of that, while the grief was no less devastating, it carried less terror.
That doesn’t mean it hurts less. It means I understand it more.
For someone living this for the first time, that understanding may not be there yet. And that absence doesn’t mean anything is wrong. Confusion, fragmentation, and fear are not signs of failure or weakness. They are a nervous system responding to something that exceeds its capacity to make sense of it all at once.
Understanding comes later. Not all at once. Not neatly. But it does come.
What surprised me most was not the presence of doubt, but its persistence. Doubt didn’t disappear as I kept going. It didn’t get resolved by movement. It simply came along.
Strength and doubt travel together now. Strength is not certainty. It’s traction. It’s the ability to keep moving even when confidence never arrives. Doubt doesn’t stop that movement. It walks beside it, reminding me that none of this was chosen, and none of it is guaranteed.
There are days when the weight feels manageable, and days when it doesn’t. Days when I move easily, and days when everything feels heavier than it should. Living forward accommodates all of it. There is no requirement that it feel steady. Only that it continues.
I didn’t know I could live like this. I never imagined I could embody this kind of strength. This was never a life I imagined needing to survive. And yet, here I am. Still breathing.
Living forward didn’t restore what was lost. It didn’t smooth the fracture or return the ground to what it was before. It simply held enough for movement to continue.
Some days that movement is steady. Other days it’s careful, provisional, unfinished. Strength and doubt travel together now, neither canceling the other out. One doesn’t resolve the other. They coexist.
Living forward isn’t a destination. It isn’t proof of healing or closure. It’s the quiet, ongoing act of remaining. Of learning as I go. Of adjusting my footing on ground that no longer behaves the way it used to. Of continuing to take the next step without knowing exactly where it leads.
And yet, here I am. Still breathing.
Still moving.
Still learning.
Still adjusting my footing.
And for now, that is enough.
