When the days get heavy and the silence speaks

When the Days Get Heavy

When the days get heavy, where do you even put the weight?

Because some days it isn’t just tiredness. It’s not just a bad night’s sleep or a long to-do list. It’s the kind of heaviness that sits in your chest and refuses to move, no matter how much life keeps asking you to carry on.

How do you move forward when you feel completely broken? When you want to step into the next chapter of life, but there’s still an invisible grip on you, still a sense of being controlled by what was, by what ended, by someone who walked away in silence?

How does someone leave after over a decade of loving you, after more than twenty-four years of knowing you, and say nothing at all? No explanation. No accountability. Just absence. And how does that silence manage to be louder than any argument ever was?

You start questioning everything, don’t you?
Your worth.
Your self-respect.
Your value.

Was I not enough? Did I miss something? Was the future I carefully mapped out ever real to them, or was I the only one holding it together?

And then there’s the cruelest part — being left to parent alone while they walk on, seemingly untouched. As if nothing wrong has been done. As if the damage didn’t ripple through every corner of your life. As if you weren’t left holding the responsibility, the heartbreak, and the day-to-day survival all at once.

How do you grieve and still pack lunches?
How do you break and still show up?
How do you fall apart quietly while being someone’s safe place?

You are exhausted. Bone-deep tired. Not just from the emotional wreckage, but from trying to keep life moving. Working full time. Taking on extra work. Doing everything. Being everything. Holding it all together because there’s no one else to do it.

And then, when the house is finally quiet, when the children are asleep and the world expects rest from you, you open the laptop at 11pm and keep going. Again. Because you have to. Because stopping feels like failing.

And you sit there and think — how is this fair?
What did I do to deserve this?
Why does it feel like I’m paying the price for someone else’s choices?

This isn’t the life you planned.
This isn’t the future you imagined.

You planned partnership. Togetherness. Shared parenting. Shared dreams. You planned stability, laughter, growing old with someone who chose you back. You didn’t plan survival mode. You didn’t plan loneliness wrapped in responsibility.

And yet… here you are. Still standing. Still loving your children fiercely. Still showing up when every part of you wants to collapse.

Maybe the days are heavy because you are carrying far more than one person should ever have to. Maybe the broken feeling isn’t weakness, but evidence of how deeply you loved, how fully you committed, how much you gave.

And maybe — just maybe — the question isn’t why did this happen to me?
But how am I still here, still trying, still choosing life despite it all?

The days are heavy.
But so is the strength it takes to survive them.