My name is Thomas, and three years ago, I would not have believed you if you'd told me my life would look like it does today.
It wasn't one big collapse. It was smaller than that, and somehow that made it harder to explain to anyone who asked if I was okay.
It started with the business. Two years of eighteen-hour days, of telling myself the next month would be the one that turned it around. I remember the exact spreadsheet I used to track it — I'd stopped being able to look at it without my hands going cold.
When it finally folded, it didn't feel like a single moment. It felt like watching something I'd poured everything into quietly stop breathing.
The marriage didn't survive what came after. I don't say that to place blame anywhere — stress does things to two people that neither of them saw coming. We were kind to each other, mostly, right up until we weren't living in the same house anymore.
I remember packing a box of kitchen things I'd bought us as a wedding gift to myself, years earlier, and not being able to finish packing it that day.
I moved into a smaller place. Then a smaller one after that.
I want to be specific about what those years actually looked like, day to day, because I think vague words like "hard times" don't tell you anything true.
It was standing in a grocery store parking lot, in my car, doing math in my head about which bill could wait another week and which one couldn't. It was learning exactly how long milk stays good past the date on the carton. It was telling my kids "not this year" about a vacation I'd promised them twice already, and watching them try to be brave about it in a way that broke something in me every single time.
It was a bank app I stopped opening because I already knew, before I even looked, what it would say. |