What starting over actually looks like
There’s a version of “starting over” that shows up in movies. A montage. A haircut. A new apartment with good light. Mine looked more like a Dollar Tree name tag and a Google Doc I keep rewriting.
A few years ago I closed a business I’d built from nothing, because the people I loved needed me more than the business did. I spent the next several years taking care of my husband and my father-in-law, full time, at home. I didn’t plan for that to be a full-time job. It just was. You do the math on nights and appointments and medications, and there isn’t room left for much else — including, most of the time, room to actually feel what was happening to me.
Grief doesn’t wait politely for a convenient time to show up. It waited anyway, because I made it. And when it finally had space to land, I was also alone with it in a way I hadn’t been in years.
That’s the part nobody tells you about caregiving that ends: the house gets quiet in a way that’s different from peaceful. You go from being needed every hour to being needed by no one, and both of those things can hollow you out.
Around that same time, I found out that trust is not the same thing as love. Some people I was close to — people I’d have said I trusted with anything — showed me otherwise. I won’t get into the specifics here, because that’s not really the point. The point is what it did afterward: I pulled inward. I stopped reaching out first. I started staying in my room more than I left it. I got quieter, and then quieter than that, until talking to people started to feel like a skill I used to have and had let go rusty.
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I still get a nervous twitch when I have to make small talk. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that in writing, but there it is.
So that’s the grief and the isolation part. Here’s the starting over part, because it’s happening at the same time, badly and unglamorously, which is I think how it actually happens for most people.
I went back to work in retail — the kind of job you take when you need money now, not the job you dreamed about. Cashier, seasonal, minimum expectations. And somewhere in there, something in me that I thought had gone quiet woke back up: I got promoted to assistant manager in three months. Nobody handed me that. I earned it while still relearning how to make eye contact with strangers.
Then the store closed. Not because of anything I did — just timing, the kind that doesn’t care how hard you worked. Back to square one, except not entirely square one, because now I also have a medical billing and coding certificate I earned somewhere in the middle of all this, and years of hands-on caregiving experience that actually means something, even if it doesn’t show up neatly on a resume. I’m applying to cleaning jobs, retail jobs, mail sorting, anything with a paycheck attached, while my car payment doesn’t care that I’m “in transition.”
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. I’m not on the other side of it yet. Some days starting over looks like an interview I actually feel good about. Other days it looks like sitting in a quiet room, not talking to anyone, wondering when I got so bad at this.
But I’ve decided that the silence isn’t serving me anymore — the one around the grief, and the one around the loneliness. So I’m writing this instead of sitting with it alone. If any part of this sounds like your life too, I’d rather know that than keep pretending everyone else has it figured out.
More soon. Probably something lighter next time. But I wanted the first thing I said here to be true.
