A Process I Did Not Invent
I am learning to walk inside a process that was not built for what I have lived through, and I am still myself within it.
Have you found yourself inside rooms whose language bends ordinary words into unfamiliar shapes? Rooms with their odd quiet. Time that stretches and then suddenly demands you be ready by a certain hour. You did not ask to learn any of this, and yet here you are — one hearing date at a time — learning.
You used to imagine a different ending. A clean one. A fair one. A conversation, a signature, a closing of the door. What you have instead is a slow, structured corridor, and you are walking it one step at a time. The chaos around the process is not coming from you.
It is allowed to feel disoriented. It is allowed to grieve the simpler ending you pictured. You did not invent the delays. You did not write the rules. You did not choose this stage. You are only required — quietly — to keep being yourself inside it.
Knowing the shape of the path does not change the path. But it does change you. There was foreignness. There is now familiarity, room by room. There will be the steadiness that lets you say, with some quiet in your chest, I do not have to win today. I only have to show up today. This is the navigation of water you did not choose, with charts you did not draw. The work is not to love the chart. The work is only to keep your bearing.
That is enough. Showing up is enough. The system does not get to define what you are. You define what you are by how you keep walking through it.