You Don’t Rise Back to Who You Were

People talk about getting back on your feet as if the goal were to return. Back to normal. Back to who you were before. Bouncing back.

I don’t think anyone really does that. Not after the kind of season where several things fall apart at once.

You may know the kind. Not one loss, which would have been hard enough, but a few, arriving close together, as if life had decided to teach everything in a single term. The work. The relationship. The body finally sending the bill for years of stress.

In a season like that, the falling isn’t a choice. It just happens, and it happens to you.

The rising is different. Not because you control how fast it goes, or how much it hurts on the way. You don’t. Some losses are large and real and take years to work through, and no amount of good attitude makes them smaller. I’ve heard the opposite said, that if you just respond the right way the circumstances don’t matter, and it always makes me flinch. Circumstances matter. What happened to you matters.

But there is one part that stays yours, even when almost nothing else does: what you rise into.

Because you don’t rise back to where you were. You rise as someone else. Someone who knows, in her body and not just in theory, what she can survive. Who has been stripped back far enough to find out what matters, and found it was smaller than she thought, and closer.

The women I know who came through hard seasons well weren’t the ones who were never devastated. Most of them were, some for a long time. What they did, somewhere in the middle of it, even partially, was keep hold of one thread. A small decision in their own direction. A refusal, not a loud one, to let the thing that happened become the whole story about them.

That refusal isn’t resilience the way it’s usually sold. It isn’t bouncing back, or getting over it. It’s closer to deciding, from inside the difficulty, who you are going to be while you’re still in it. Then deciding again the next day. Made and remade enough times, it becomes the shape of whoever walks out the other side.

I am not the same person I was before my hardest season, and I’m not sure I’d want to be. She didn’t yet know what she could survive. She hadn’t yet learned that the things carrying her through weren’t the things she had spent years worrying about losing.

The falling was never yours to choose.

What you rise into is.

This is KC — from Love & Life. 💜