I Can Keep Going, But I Don’t Always Feel Like I’m Going Anywhere That Belongs To Me

Dear Delyara, I can do the day. I can manage the children, the money, the work, the house, the email, the forms, the meals, the endless invisible architecture of adult life. I can make all of it continue with a degree of competence that often makes other people assume direction exists simply because motion does. But motion is not the same thing as path. Some days I feel like I am sustaining a structure rather than inhabiting a life. Like I am preserving a machine that works but no longer know whether the machine is taking me somewhere I would consciously choose if I stood far enough back to see it clearly. That frightens me. Because drifting can look so much like reliability from the outside. And women are praised for reliability even when it is taking them further away from themselves.