Holding the Day Together: Notes From the Edges of Myself

A day built from tiny negotiations with fear, hunger and breath.

Today was a day held together in small movements. It unfolded not in sweeping moments, but in the careful negotiations between fear, hunger and breath.

I woke to a sense of tightness in my chest and the familiar weight that can make simple tasks feel far away. Even ordinary things, like going to the kitchen, can feel impossible sometimes. I broke the morning down into the smallest pieces I could find: stand, reach the door, pause, return.

I reached for a piece of chocolate first, because that was something I could manage in that moment. Noise, knives and the sense of being exposed narrowed my world to just a few metres. I placed a food order online because leaving the house was too much to face. Watching the delivery time shift made my own breathing shift with it. When the driver arrived, I managed the exchange and went straight back to bed, my heart still racing but my body still moving forward.

Eating was another negotiation: chocolate first, then chicken sausages, and then sitting upright long enough to notice the grip around my chest loosening just a fraction. Nothing about this changed everything, but it carried me through the next minutes, and then the next.

There were points in the day where sadness rose quickly and without warning. Living alone means shouldering both the heaviness and the uncertainty of what might come next. Yet, today, I stayed with myself anyway. I carried the hours in workable pieces.

Tomorrow, R. will take me to see a therapist. Next week I’ll find out if I’ve been offered the flat I bid on. Those are part of the wider picture. Today was about what was directly beneath my feet.

What I want to carry forward into longer pieces is this: nothing changed all at once, yet the day held because I made space for each surge of fear and each tiny task. No heroics. No drama. Just survival in honest, slow movements.