There’s No Handbook for This

Content Warning: Raw emotions around disability, grief, rage, and suicidal thoughts. Strong language and honesty ahead. Please take care reading.

Learning to hold all my emotions at once without being consumed by any one of them is so hard. Trying to do a task, a movement, something my body could do five years ago, but now I crumble to the floor. Tears stream down my face. My partner picks me up, sits with me, and gives me space to collect myself. To feel this. All of this. The grief, the heaviness, the un-fucking-fairness of it all.

“You can do it. We just have to adapt. We can learn to do it differently.” he gently whispers.

I feel the encouragement wash over me, but I want to push it away. It is so fucking unfair. I am so mad. I want to wallow in it, to fully be in the pain, to sink into it.

But I am learning to adapt. And it sucks. I am learning new routines, and it is bullshit. I am finding new ways of doing things. I am adding rest breaks to my day. I am learning patience. And I am filled with rage. Some days, I even make room for joy and I am learning to do that more.

Everything can feel so hard all at once. I thought I finally found some stability. I finally found safety after leaving an abusive marriage. I finally made friends with my madness and then my body just fell apart, betraying me in ways I didn’t expect. It all crashes down at once. It feels so damn unfair, and I want to scream it out loud. I need to be heard. To be truly witnessed. No toxic positivity. I want someone to see the ugly and just sit with it. And when I’m ready, I can hear that I can learn new ways to adapt. But on the hard days, I’m not always ready for that.

There is no Handbook for the Recently Disabled, though I wish there was. Much of what I do now comes from what I needed when all this began. I needed a space to sort it out, a space where I was not pathologized, where there was no spiritual bypassing, no “Have you tried meds?” “Yoga?” “Meditation?” or “My aunt did acupuncture and…” A space where I could be filled with rage, unhinged, suicidal, full of doom and still be met with care and collaborative support. A non-carceral space to just be with it all.

Because I feel so deeply, so intensely. And yes, that can be a lot. But it does not mean I am too much. And it certainly does not mean I need a higher level of care or that I am attention seeking. It means I am human. It means my experiences, my pain, my joy, and my rage are valid. It means I am asking to be seen fully and met with compassion, not judgment or dismissal. Feeling this much is part of my truth, and that truth deserves space to be held gently and honored.

This journey is tender and sometimes overwhelming. It is okay to feel all the feelings, even the messy ones, and still move forward in your own time. Adapting is not about giving up. It is about gently honoring where you are, holding space for everything you feel, and finding your own way with kindness and patience. Bit by bit, you learn to carry it all with grace, even on the hardest days.