Post 8: Still Choosing

In the early days, I didn’t think I was choosing forward.

I thought I was just doing the next thing.

Make the phone call. Open the document. Answer the message. Turn off the TV. Get through the afternoon.

None of it felt brave. None of it felt like healing. Most of the time, it just felt like surviving.

In those early days, I often cried out, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this.”

Sometimes I said it aloud when I was home alone. Sometimes it was only in my mind as I shook my head in deep sorrow. Often it became a prayer.

It wasn’t anger. It was mourning.

I did not want this life. I did not know how to live it.

And beneath the protest was another plea:

Help me see how I can do this.

Almost six years later, I can see what I couldn’t see then.

Those small acts were not isolated. They were the beginning of a pattern.

I had been choosing forward.

I saw it recently while looking back at my weight loss and trying to understand how it had happened. Not just what the scale had done, but what I had been doing, choice after choice, over time.

And then I saw the larger pattern.

The one that had been running underneath my life for almost six years without a name.

I had been choosing forward. Not dramatically. Not triumphantly. Just—consistently.

Through grief and loneliness and fear. Through graduate school, travel, exercise, and writing. Through the days I didn’t want to, the days I didn’t feel ready, and the days I wasn’t sure what forward even meant anymore.

Choosing forward did not mean choosing what happened next.

It meant meeting the next thing I could inside a life I had not chosen.

Sometimes that next thing was a decision. Sometimes it was accepting help. Sometimes it was simply getting through the hour.

I didn’t know I was creating a pattern. I thought I was just making one choice, and then another.

It was only when I looked back that I could see what all those choices had become.

Still choosing is what I’m calling it now.

Not: I was strong.

Not: I healed.

Not: I figured it out.

Just—I kept choosing.

Exercising when I didn’t want to. Writing when it was hard. Staying present with my grandchildren when grief made everything feel far away. Booking the France trip. Sending the email. Making choices that supported the life I was trying to build.

Small choices, made again and again.

Not one dramatic decision, but a thousand quiet ones.

Grief did not disappear while I was making them. Loneliness did not disappear. Fear did not disappear.

I was choosing forward with all of it still present—not after it resolved, not once I felt ready, but alongside it.

That’s what I couldn’t see while it was happening. From the inside, each choice just felt like the next thing. It didn’t feel like a pattern. It didn’t feel like strength.

It mostly just felt like Tuesday.

But it was adding up to something.

Almost six years later, I can see the shape of it.

And the thing I want you to know—if you are somewhere in the early days, or the middle days, or the days that don’t have a name yet—is that your choices may be adding up too.

Even the ones that feel like nothing.

Even the ones that feel like barely.

Still choosing implies tomorrow.