Rediscovering Ordinary in the Shadows of Extraordinary

What survival looks like after the survival story ends

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The problem with surviving is that no one tells you how. You wake up every day, long after the cameras have stopped rolling and the sympathy has run dry, wondering how to keep breathing in a world that forgot your struggle. The Facebook posts get fewer likes. The check-ins stop. People assume you’re better now, as if survival has a finish line.

I don’t measure time in days or weeks anymore. My clock runs on small victories — tiny milestones that would seem invisible to anyone else. Six months of keeping a plant alive, the soil dark and damp beneath my fingertips. Three weeks of replying to texts before the guilt swallows me. Two days of catching my reflection in the mirror without recoiling, daring to meet my own eyes. The calendar on my wall may track appointments and deadlines, but my body keeps its own calendar: the breaths I take between panic attacks, the steps from the bed to the door on the hardest days.

Surviving feels like learning to walk again on legs that don’t trust the ground. Whether you’ve escaped a burning house or walked out of a dead-end job, the after feels the same — wobbly, unsteady, and impossibly fragile.