This Is How I Live Now

From the outside, very little appears different. I still show up. I still participate. I still move through days that look ordinary enough. There’s no single moment anyone could point to and say, “That’s when it changed.”

But internally, everything is negotiated now. Time is measured differently. Energy is counted instead of assumed. I don’t move from one thing to the next without considering what it will cost later. That calculation runs quietly in the background of everything.

What’s difficult is that nothing obvious marks this shift. There was no clear break, no event that made it official. Life simply narrowed its margins. The space for spontaneity thinned. Recovery began taking up more room than effort itself.

I still recognize myself. My interests didn’t disappear. My relationships didn’t vanish. What changed was the way those things fit together. They now arrange themselves around limits that weren’t there before, or weren’t loud enough to matter.

There’s a strange stability in this stage. Not comfort exactly, but familiarity. I know what a day requires now. I know how to move through it without fighting what’s already true. That knowledge doesn’t fix anything, but it keeps things from constantly unraveling.

Nothing dramatic has failed. Nothing has been resolved. This is simply where things landed — a life that continues forward, shaped by adjustments that no one sees, but that guide everything I do now.