Before Choosing Yourself

On endurance before language, and the years that shape us before we choose ourselves.

I didn’t think about meaning then.

I didn’t have words for questions like that.

What I knew was simpler — and much heavier.

The floor could fall away without warning.

And when it did, life did not pause to explain itself.

My father died on a Saturday.

By Monday, the world had decided to continue.

Not gently.

Not slowly.

It kept turning — and took me with it.

I arrived at school late, by design.

Assembly had ended. Children spilled out of the hall, voices rising, shoes scraping on paving stones, bags swung onto shoulders. The ordinary noise of life resuming.

And then I stepped into it.

Some faces lifted.

Some hesitated.

Some looked away almost immediately.

No one came closer.

No one said anything.

No one knew where to place me.

So I kept walking.

From that point on, life became something to move through rather than understand.

Something that happened, rather than something you stood inside.

At home, adults disappeared behind closed doors. Conversations carried on without me. Decisions were made elsewhere. I waited on the stairs and in doorways, listening for tone, learning what could be gathered from silence alone.

I learned quickly that being nearby mattered more than being heard. That presence counted, even without a voice. I knew that was what my mother needed. Me.

The house stayed standing, but its centre no longer moved. It reorganised itself around strain. Around waiting. Around what could not be spoken yet still had to be carried.

My grandmother came to live with us and moved into the upstairs room. Care became an act of love carried out without ceremony — medicines measured, sheets smoothed, voices lowered. No explanations. No reassurance. Just what needed doing, done again the next day.

Watching an elder fail teaches a child things no one intends to teach: how fragile bodies are, how endurance works, how love continues without guarantees.

When that ended, it did not end cleanly. The room changed hands. The house tightened. Anger entered where grief had been held. Then illness again. Then death again. Watching a man fight for breath teaches you things you carry long after you should have been spared them.

I learned how a rich and full home can become a cavernous house overnight.

From there, I learned a new rhythm.

People leave.

Survival is quieter than it looks.

Adaptability is praised, even when it costs you something unnamed.

Life narrowed to practicality. To small decisions about keeping things from falling apart further. What next. Then this. Then that.

Who am I did not enter the picture.

What do I want never formed as a question.

Meaning did not vanish.
It thinned.

Not Who am I?
But What will get me through this?

Not What do I want?
But What is required now?

Get through.

Be acceptable.

Don’t be destroyed by living.

There were moments of beauty — sunlight through trees, music on the radio, long afternoons lost in books and daydreams. But they were islands, not foundations. I only knew that stopping to feel it would be dangerous.

So I kept moving.

School led to the next thing.

Then the next.

Life became a sequence of what-nexts rather than a question of self.

Only much later would I realise that this thinning — this long training in endurance — had already begun shaping the choices I believed were freely made later on.

At the time, I didn’t know that.

I only knew how to keep going.

A Small Invitation for This Week

Think back to a time before you had language for choice.

Before decisions felt personal.

Notice what your life became organised around then —

not who you were, but what helped you survive.

You don’t need to judge it.

Just notice where meaning began to thin, quietly, long before you ever thought to question it.