Between Worlds: The Cost of Later

I keep thinking about time lately. About where it went and what I was doing while it was going.

I spent years in situations I knew weren’t right for me. Years accommodating, adjusting, staying past the point where staying made any real sense, keeping a kind of peace that required me to stay very quiet. And while all of that was happening, my body was taking notes. It absorbed what I wouldn’t say and eventually made itself impossible to ignore.

I have health challenges now that slow me down in ways that frustrate me. I can feel how much I still have in me, how much I want to do and say and become, and my body is asking me to be patient at the exact moment I finally feel ready to move without apology. That gap is its own quiet grief. I have had to learn to call it that and sit with it honestly instead of trying to push past it.

What I wrestle with most is the feeling that I spent my good years on the wrong things. On people who were never fully available to me. On silence that protected everyone’s comfort but my own. On managing how I was perceived so carefully that I didn’t stop to ask whether I was building a life that was truly mine or just maintaining the one I had learned to survive in.

I am trying to extend some grace to the version of me who made those choices. She was doing what she knew how to do with what she understood at the time. She didn’t have the clarity I have now, and the clarity I have now only exists because she lived through everything she lived through.

I am still here. Still building something from all of it. That counts for something, even on the days it doesn’t feel like enough.