What Now?

I don’t know what I thought middle age would feel like, but I didn’t think it would feel like this. I had vague ideas once, soft-edged and sparkling with something like certainty—that life would settle. I thought the pieces would click together and I’d walk through my days with an air of having arrived. But instead, here I am, standing in the wreckage of expectations I didn’t even realize I was still carrying. The house is in disarray, a constant cycle of half-hearted tidying and slow decay, as if the walls themselves are weary. Clutter in the corners of rooms we don’t use, dishes in the sink, stacks of papers with no rightful place, and dust collecting in the quiet spaces I can’t bear to look at too closely. I should do something about it, but then again, I should do so many things.

The feuds remain loud, their edges sharpened over the years. Family, divided along fault lines that I used to think were invisible—surely we were built on something stronger than politics, the cycles of lies, dysfunction, addictions, and resentments no one will say aloud but everyone carries around like sacred artifacts. I thought we shared values, but I must have been mistaken. The fractures between us continue to widen as time moves forward. Often I feel alone and defeated, wishing I could have pulled the pieces back together, but I am only one person, and the weight of history is heavy.

And the world—oh, the world. It isn’t just my own small life that seems to be unraveling. The familiar structures are collapsing and institutions are crumbling. The air is thick with the slow, sinking realization that the world I grew up in is being swallowed whole. Maybe it always was, maybe I was just too distracted to notice. But now, it is undeniable.

And my body. My mind. My own long term companions, again betraying me—but now in ways I don’t understand. Muscles stiffen, bones ache, thoughts scatter like startled birds. I wake up tired and carry exhaustion like a second skin. I whisper bargains into the dark: just get me through today, and I will be kinder tomorrow. But tomorrow comes, and I am still tired, still aching, still wading through the thick murk of my own existence.

I just didn’t expect it to be so hard.

I thought—no, I hoped—that life would eventually ease into itself. That there would be a moment where I could exhale, where the weight would lift, and I would understand, finally, what it felt like to move through the world unburdened. I waited for that moment, I am waiting for that moment. But it never comes. It never even comes close.

So I keep moving. Begrudgingly, mechanically. One foot in front of the other. Not out of hope, not out of ambition, but because what else is there to do? I wake up, I drink my coffee, I press through the hours, I collapse into sleep, and then I do it all again. The days blur together, a long, unbroken stretch of something that doesn’t quite feel like living. I fear I’ve been here for so long that I’ve forgotten the way out. That I no longer even believe a way out exists.

But in the midst of it, there are moments. Small, flickering things that I cling to like driftwood in a storm. A conversation that makes me laugh when I had nothing left. A familiar voice on the phone, grounding me when I feel I might float away. The people who remind me I still matter, who pull me back when I start to forget myself. They do not know they are saving me, but they are.

And yet, today feels like a defeat.

A sharp, bitter reminder that nothing will change unless I do. That I am the lock and the key, the cage and the open door. That I am both the problem and the possibility of something else.

But what if I can’t? What if I have been this version of myself for so long that I don’t know how to be anything else? What if the way out isn’t through but back, back to something I no longer remember, something I no longer even recognize as mine?

I sit in the quiet of my house, in the midst of the mess I can’t seem to fix, and I ask myself the same question I have been asking for years:

What now?