Phuro!

Sometimes in life, we unconsciously lose track.

We switch to autopilot without even noticing.

It’s almost as if life starts living you.

You do what needs to be done.
You work.
You arrange things.
You react to whatever comes your way.

You take care of others.
Your children.
Maybe your parents.

And somewhere along the way, without really noticing, you stop taking care of you.

Maybe it’s because of circumstances.
Maybe there are simply too many challenges at once.

You don’t realise you’re in survival mode.

You become unaware of your own needs.

You barely stop to ask yourself:

Is this actually how I want to live?

I know what that feels like because I’ve experienced it myself.

That overwhelming feeling of too many cares and responsibilities.
A head full of things that aren’t really yours to begin with.
Tiredness.

Sometimes complete exhaustion.

After my dad died, my mom came to live with our family of three.

And really, she is a lovely, easy-going person.

But my life was turned upside down.

Suddenly, I felt as though I didn’t have any space for myself anymore.

So at night, I would stay awake just a little longer.

Just to have some me-time.

A little silence.

A little space without all those occupations running through my head.

And then there was my partner.

He was struggling with addiction and had become almost completely unresponsive to anything I had to say.

Eventually, I started feeling that I had failed as a partner too.

I guess many of us experience periods like this in life.

Different circumstances.

Different stories.

The same feeling of slowly disappearing somewhere underneath it all.

But a while ago, something happened.

My partner stopped drinking completely.

The change in him was almost instant.

Not only in the way he looked, but in his behaviour too.

And strangely enough, as he began to change, something changed in me too.

I started doing things for myself again.

Things that gave me energy.

I picked up books again.

I started writing again.

Ideas returned.

Inspiration returned.

Joie de vivre!

I started to feel again.

Not all my problems had disappeared.

Far from it.

But one of them had started to dissolve.

One enormous weight was lifted from my shoulders, and somehow that little bit of space brought so much of me back.

It made me realise:

I have a life of my own too!

And somewhere in that newly created space, there it was.

A tiny spark.

Enough to ignite the fire again.

For you, the ignition might be something entirely different.

Maybe it’s finally walking away from something that has been draining you for years.

Maybe someone you love comes clean after a long struggle with addiction.

Maybe it’s someone you meet.

A song.

A book.

A trip.

A journey.

Or just one simple sentence that somehow reaches you at exactly the right moment.

Sometimes one thing can touch a part of you that you had almost forgotten existed.

It doesn’t have to save you.

It doesn’t have to solve everything.

Maybe it just needs to remind you that the fire is still there.

And suddenly, little by little, you find yourself back in the driver’s seat of your own life.

Because sometimes you don’t realise you’ve been surviving

until something makes you want to live again.