The Quiet Shift: A Meditation from Underground

Something has broken open in me.

Not like glass shattering, but like a seed cracking in the dark… quiet, inevitable, irreversible.

I used to care about things that now feel like echoes.

Not because I’m better than who I was, or better than anyone else, but because something changed.

Maybe it was the weight of caregiving.

Maybe it was illness.

Maybe it was the exhaustion that pulled the veil off everything and made the truth too plain to ignore.

I look around now and see people pouring themselves into things that no longer feel real to me.

Chasing status, spinning in performance, curating lives as if to outrun their own loneliness.

And I don’t hate them.

I don’t wish them harm.

But I also can’t join them.

I can’t unsee what I’ve seen.

I can’t unknow what it costs to show up, to keep someone alive, to hold a house together when no one else will.

This isn’t bitterness.

It’s just different.

The way a tide feels different when you’ve been pulled under and made it back to shore.

The way silence feels sacred when your days have been filled with alarms, beeping monitors, and the sound of your own name called over and over in need.

There’s no going back.

And maybe that’s the hardest part.

Not the pain, but the clarity.

Not the loss, but what it revealed.

Something has broken open in me.

And for now, I’m just learning how to live with the light coming in.