Yesterday wasn’t a good day. Nothing happened, really — no incident, no bad news, nothing I could point to and say “that’s what did it.” It was just one of those days where I woke up already a little heavier than usual. I made coffee, got the girls ready for the day, sat down to check emails, all the normal things — and underneath every single one of them was this low hum of dread I couldn’t attach to anything real. By the afternoon my chest was tight and my hands were cold for no reason I could name. I stood in front of the laundry pile for a solid minute without moving, not because I was tired, but because my body felt like it was bracing for something, and there was nothing to brace for. Sometimes days are just not good days. I’m trying to let that be an okay thing to say out loud instead of something I have to explain or fix immediately.
Ever since that July 4th, I’ve had two very different versions of remembering it. Some stretches, it feels like it was a nightmare that happened to someone else and simply passed — a story I tell now more than a thing I still carry. I’ll be at a checkup, making small talk with the nurse about her weekend while she takes my blood pressure, and I’ll think, almost casually, huh, that used to be the scariest room in my life, and now it’s just Tuesday. Other times I can feel it in my body again, actually feel it, and it reminds me that life is uncertain, that there was nothing about it I could control, and my whole body goes cold and shaky like it’s happening in real time instead of years ago. Sometimes it’s a smell in a waiting room. Sometimes it’s nothing at all, just a random Wednesday where my mind decides to hand me the memory unprompted, like it’s checking whether I’ve really let it go or just gotten good at pretending I have.
I live with the knowledge that fear like that doesn’t fully leave, it just changes how often it visits. But living in fear isn’t living, so I fight myself back out of it and go looking for reassurance that everything is, in fact, okay. Have you ever felt that — that tug-of-war between the relief that it’s over and the part of you that never quite believes it?
Living With Uncertainty After a Health Scare
Nobody really tells you that the hard part isn’t just the event itself — it’s everything after. The intrusive thoughts that show up uninvited on a completely ordinary day, usually at the exact moment I’m not braced for them. Folding towels. Waiting in the school pickup line. Somewhere in the middle of a totally boring task, my brain will quietly slide in a thought like what if it comes back, and for a few seconds my whole chest goes tight before I even register what happened. The way your own body can suddenly feel like something you’re not sure you trust anymore — that’s the part I wasn’t prepared for. You’d think surviving something would make you feel more resilient, invincible even. For me it mostly did the opposite for a long time. It made me acutely, uncomfortably aware of every ache, every weird pain, every night my back felt stiff in a way that used to just be “I slept wrong” and is now, for half a second, something bigger before I talk myself down.
What actually helps, most days, is smaller and less dramatic than I’d like it to be. I’ve learned to say it out loud the second I notice it happening, even if it’s just to myself — “okay, this is the fear talking, not new information.” Sometimes I text my friend S, who’s heard enough of these messages by now that she doesn’t ask for the full explanation anymore, she just sends back something dumb and unrelated to make me laugh, which somehow works better than a serious pep talk would. Sometimes I just step outside for two minutes, no phone, and let the air do something to my nervous system that thinking clearly never quite manages on its own. None of it makes the thought disappear. It just gives it somewhere to go that isn’t straight into a spiral.
I don’t think that ever fully goes away. I think you just get a little better, slowly, at noticing when it’s happening and talking yourself back down instead of staying stuck in it. Some days that’s a two-minute process. Yesterday it took most of the afternoon, and I still went to bed feeling like I hadn’t quite finished the job.
Church, Doubt, and What I Actually Believe
My family is Catholic, and they raised me to be one. Church every Sunday, the good, the bad, heaven and hell, all of it. I remember the uncomfortable dress shoes, the smell of the incense, standing and kneeling and standing again on cue like everyone else, and mostly spending the hour wondering how much longer it would be. I grew up forming my own opinions along the way — quietly, mostly to myself, because it didn’t feel like the kind of thing you announced at the dinner table — and by the time I turned 16 I finally said it out loud. I asked my parents if I could stop going. I told them I wasn’t sure what I actually believed, and that going through the motions every Sunday felt dishonest when I couldn’t say for certain what I was even agreeing to. To their credit, they let me stop. It wasn’t a dramatic conversation. I think they’d probably seen it coming for a while.
Honestly, I’m still not sure what I believe. I don’t believe in a lot of what the church, as an institution, teaches — the rules, the guilt, the very tidy division of who’s in and who’s out. But the way I see it, somebody or something had to have started all of this. With a purpose, or completely at random? I don’t know. And these days, I genuinely don’t spend much energy trying to figure it out — I used to, in my twenties especially, when I’d stay up trying to land on an answer that would finally settle the question for good. It never did. At some point I just stopped needing it to.
My only real goal at this point in life is finding moments of happiness. I didn’t have a particularly easy childhood, which is its own post for another day, so when I actually get to feel happy now — genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, not just “fine” — I notice it and I hold onto it. I’ve stopped needing a doctrine to tell me that matters. It just does.
Why I Still Believe in Signs From the Universe
One of the things that made it hardest to actually “live” after everything with my health was not having any guarantee that it was all going to be okay. Nobody can give you that guarantee, which is a maddening thing to sit with, especially for someone who spent most of her twenties wanting hard proof before she’d believe anything.
I remember one drive in particular — about an hour, on my way to see my mother — not long after everything with the surgery, when the weight of it all finally caught up to me somewhere on the highway. I was crying so hard I could barely see the road, gripping the wheel, radio off, just me and my own thoughts circling the same fear over and over. At some point I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I said it out loud, to no one, to the universe, whatever that even means: “Please, I can’t live like this. Please, please, give me a sign that everything will be okay. Make a bird cross my sight right now.” It was a completely clear sky, not a cloud in it, nothing moving anywhere. Nothing. And then, right after I said it — not minutes later, right after, while the words were basically still in the air — a big bird cut across my windshield, right to left.
I started laughing and crying at the same time and said, out loud, alone in the car, “really?” like I was half daring it to happen again. And then a second bird crossed, this time left to right, close enough that I actually flinched. That was the moment I told myself the universe had actually talked to me, and that everything really was going to be okay. I drove the rest of the way with the windows cracked and the radio back on, and by the time I got to my mother’s I didn’t even tell her what had happened. I just sat with her, quieter than usual, still turning it over in my head.
Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe two birds cross a clear highway sky more often than we notice and I just happened to be paying attention at the exact right second. I genuinely don’t know, and unlike my twenties self, I’ve stopped needing to know in order to let it comfort me.
The problem is I forget that moment more than I’d like to admit, and it’s hard to tell my own mind to quiet down once the intrusive thoughts start circling again. On a bad day like yesterday, the birds feel very far away, like something that happened to a different, braver version of me. But I’m getting better at pulling that memory back out when I need it, even if it takes longer than I’d like. I’ll get better at that.
If sitting with my own mind long enough to actually calm it down were easy, I don’t think I’d still be working on it years later. That struggle — the gap between knowing what should help and actually being able to do it when your thoughts are loud — is exactly what Meditation Without the Bullsh*t is about. It’s the book I hand people who assume sitting quietly should be simple. It isn’t, and I think it helps to hear that from someone who still has bad days.
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On Another Note: The Two-Month Countdown
Today is July 27th, which means we have, quite literally, two months to figure out what the fudge we’re going to do about the building. If we don’t sell, we’ll have to pay our share of the reinforcement and renovation — an amount I genuinely don’t know how we’ll cover yet, and that not-knowing is its own low-grade hum of dread most days, separate from anything to do with my health. But once the reno is finished, in about two years, the apartment will be worth considerably more than it is now. That’s the math everyone keeps reminding us of, as if knowing the eventual payoff makes the in-between easier. It doesn’t, not really, but I understand why people say it.
On the other hand, if we got an offer, even a low one, it might let us move further from the coast — which is the only way we could actually afford more space right now — and get a little land. Grow some of our own food. Have my beloved chickens, the ones I already refer to as “mis gallinas” in my head even though I don’t have a single one yet, don’t have a coop, don’t even have the land. I’ve caught myself, more than once, picturing a very specific, very unearned morning: stepping outside in whatever counts as cold where we’d be, coffee in hand, throwing scraps to birds that don’t exist yet, on land we don’t own yet, in a life that is currently nothing but a spreadsheet M and I keep reopening at eleven at night. It would be its own long project — the place we’d get would need real work before it felt like ours, it’s literally sinking as it stands right now, if I’m honest — but I love that kind of project. Something about taking a place that’s falling apart and slowly making it livable, room by room, appeals to something in me that I don’t fully understand and have stopped questioning.
M and I were up late debating what the right call would even be, just in case we actually end up with options — because as of right now, staying is the only option on the table, and we both know it. He kept pulling up numbers on his laptop, the screen too bright in the dark living room, and I kept asking questions I already knew he didn’t have answers to yet, because saying them out loud felt better than sitting with them silently. What about the girls’ school. What about how far we’d be from everyone. What if we sell low and regret it in two years when the building’s finished and worth double. What if we don’t sell and can’t cover our share anyway. Neither of us landed on anything close to a decision. We just went in circles, tired, half-joking about chickens to make the whole conversation feel lighter than it actually was.
At one point M actually stopped, looked at me, and said something like, “you know we’re going to be okay either way, right?” which is such an M thing to say — steady, a little too calm for the hour, completely unbothered by how unfinished the plan actually was. I didn’t fully believe him in the moment. I don’t always. But I noticed I wanted to, which felt like its own small kind of progress.
And honestly, maybe this is the universe talking to me again, telling me we’re supposed to stay. It’s just not telling me how the fudge I’m supposed to pay for the reno. I guess we’ll see.
If any of this financial-uncertainty-meets-big-life-decision territory sounds familiar, I wrote more about how we ended up here in the story of the vacation that turned into five years, and the January that shook things up.
For what it’s worth, yesterday wasn’t a total loss, even with the cold hands and the laundry pile I couldn’t move past. My 7-year-old told me a joke she’d clearly been saving up all day — something about a chicken crossing a road that was somehow both the oldest joke in the world and the funniest thing I’d heard all week, mostly because of how proud of herself she looked delivering it. For about thirty seconds, the dread just wasn’t there. That’s not nothing. Some days a thirty-second window is the whole win.
I don’t have a tidy ending for any of this today — not the fear, not the faith questions, not the building. Some days I believe the birds. Some days I just feel cold and shaky and wait for it to pass. Both are true, and I’m learning that’s allowed. I think that’s really the only honest takeaway I have: you don’t have to resolve the big uncertain things to still have a decent day, or a decent week, or a decent life in the meantime. You just carry them alongside everything else, the laundry and the school pickup and the spreadsheet at eleven at night, and you look for your birds where you can find them.
Thank you so much for spending ten minutes here with me today. If you think someone in your life could use a little story-time break, or if any of this resonated with you, I’d love it if you shared it with them.
Make it a great day!
— L
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