You are going to get through this one

This has been a hard stretch and you are still here, upright, making coffee. Both halves of that are true and only one of them gets any attention. The kettle is doing its slow build. There is light coming up the wall in the way it does whether or not the year is going well. You have kept going through worse than this and the evidence is standing in the kitchen.

A mug with a chip in the rim you keep meaning to replace. Somebody's car starting badly in the street and then starting. The fridge finding its note and holding it. Your own hands, warm around the cup, doing the ordinary thing while everything else is loud.

Hard years do not announce their ending, which is the part that makes them so heavy. There is no signal, no moment where somebody tells you the worst of it is behind you, so the mind fills that silence with the assumption that this is simply how things are now. The reason that assumption is so convincing is that you cannot see out from inside it; a bad stretch flattens the future into more of the present, and it does that to everybody, every time, whatever their circumstances. It is a trick of position, not a reading of your life.

Ask what you actually know rather than what you can feel. You have been through hard stretches before and every single one of them ended, not because you outsmarted it but because you were still there when it did. That is not a small thing and it is not luck. It is the only mechanism there has ever been, and it asks for exactly one quality, which is the willingness to be present tomorrow as well. Nothing about this year has taken that from you. It has only made it harder to notice you still have it.

So today you do one thing the version of you in six months would thank you for. Small and dull and specific. A walk, a call returned, a bill opened. Not because it fixes the year but because it is a message from you to that person saying you kept going.

This will end. Not today, and probably not in a way you notice, but it will. Until then you are doing the only thing that has ever worked, which is being here for it. That counts for more than it feels like.