Just Be Human: On Illness, Reckoning, and the Quiet Art of Staying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edB-Xv7O7wM

I find myself in a season of quiet reckoning, and I am writing this as a way of staying with it rather than trying to resolve it. Long ago, I learned how to keep moving, how to carry hope like a torch so others would not have to sit in the dark. From the outside, it looked like resilience, faith, momentum, the kind of strength that reassures people that everything will be okay because I will make it so. What was less visible was the cost of never being allowed to falter. When the world assumes you will rise again without pause, grief is expected to be brief and pain politely managed. So I learned to walk on, even when my breath was shallow, even when my spirit was quietly asking for stillness.

The illness came before the understanding. It did not arrive dramatically at first, but in fragments. Fatigue that did not resolve. Pain that did not negotiate. A deep and wordless knowing that something inside me was no longer willing to be overridden. I tried, instinctively, to meet it the way I had met everything else, with patience, endurance, optimism. Surely this too could be carried. But the signals grew louder, and what eventually arrived was not just a diagnosis, but a reckoning.

The diagnosis did not surprise my deeper self. It felt like confirmation. A message delivered through the body when the soul had already exhausted its quieter languages. It marked the moment where endurance reached its limit, where what had been swallowed, softened, reframed, and spiritualized could no longer remain unspoken. My body, wise, ancient, unapologetic, refused to carry what I had been trained to metabolize alone. This diagnosis belongs to a longer story than symptoms and timelines. It belongs to the places where trust was placed outward while consequences were absorbed inward, to the years of staying loyal to people, systems, and stories that required my silence in exchange for belonging.

I see now how I once followed resonance instead of proof, believing truth would announce itself simply by sounding right. Experience corrected me, not with bitterness, but with precision. Each disappointment sharpened my sight. My circle narrowed. My intuition grew teeth. What remains is not suspicion, but discernment. There were bonds that sought to harness a fire meant to roam. I have been called too much for wanting depth, space, freedom, growth, for refusing stagnation, for insisting that life be lived from the inside out. I was asked, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly, to make myself smaller so others could remain comfortable. Choosing myself was framed as abandonment, when in truth it was survival. Walking away from what I once believed in broke my heart, but it saved my soul. My body remembers these choices even when my mind tries to move past them.

In the quiet chambers of this life, I have also come to recognize emotional hunger. Being the steady one. The witness. The keeper of other people’s storms. Rarely being asked who held me. So I learned the old arts of self soothing, self trust, self rescue, not as empowerment, but as necessity. These were not skills I chose. They were rites I was given. Ways to survive in the absence of reliable support. The diagnosis did not create this truth, but it illuminated it, made it impossible to ignore.

I am releasing the guilt of outgrowing people, roles, and versions of myself that depended on my silence. I have learned that love does not always mean staying, and that departure can be an act of reverence. I no longer argue my leaving. I bless it, and I go. Even now. Especially now. The most frightening reckoning of all, because I never wanted to appear weak, is this. I am shedding the lie that I must always be well, always strong, always capable of carrying more. I am remembering that rest is sacred, that slowing is a form of wisdom, and that vulnerability does not extinguish my fire. It refines it.

This healing does not announce itself. It works underground, quietly, in tissue and breath and bone. This diagnosis is not a failure of my body. It is a boundary drawn at last. A line that says no more carrying what was never meant to be held alone.

And then, last Sunday, I sat in front of a canvas. Working on a portrait was not as effortless as I imagined it would be, and yet it is unfolding. I arrived with the familiar expectation that skill and intention would be enough, that if I moved quickly and confidently I could bend the image to my will. Instead, the canvas asked something else of me, something slower, something humbler. First the shadows, then the skin tones, layer by layer, adjustment by adjustment. Each refinement quietly confronted my impatience, my old habit of speed, my longing to rush toward something finished, something worthy of being called a masterpiece. What surprised me most was not the technical challenge, but the emotional one. How quickly discomfort surfaced when the image resisted me. How easily the urge to abandon, to distract, to move on appeared. The same reflex I have known all my life.

This acrylics art class keeps reminding me that art does not respond to urgency. It responds to presence, to listening, to allowing the image to reveal itself in its own time. Sitting there, brush in hand, I realized this was not just about learning to paint. It was about learning to remain. To sit with ambiguity without demanding resolution. To let curiosity replace fear. To stay when nothing was certain and nothing was finished. This portrait became a mirror. Of illness. Of grief. Of becoming. Of the truth that sometimes evolution is loud and catalytic, and sometimes all we are asked to do is sit quietly and not abandon ourselves.

It was from this place that the song Just Be Human came through.

Not as a proclamation, not as a declaration of strength, but as permission. A place to land. The world keeps saying stand up, be brave, carry the fire, do not bend, do not break, but my body whispered a different truth. I have been strong for so long, I forgot how to lose. I did not write this song to inspire resilience. I wrote it because I can feel the collective grief rising like a tide, and I no longer want to be its vessel. Because sometimes becoming is a magnificent, chaotic evolution, and sometimes all we are asked to do is sit quietly and breathe. I do not need to rise. I do not need to shine. I do not need to save anyone tonight.

I am learning to trust that each soul will meet its own truth in its own time, and that my role is not to lead the way, but to hold compassion as they rise.

This is not a retreat from life. It is an arrival into truth.

Perhaps this is what I am learning now. That wholeness is not something we reach by force. It emerges when we stop running long enough to listen, when we meet discomfort with curiosity instead of fear, when we allow ourselves to be shaped rather than insisting on control.

Perhaps what lies ahead is not meant to break us, but to purify us. Not through endurance or heroics, but through a return to our shared humanity. By releasing the stories that ask us to be superhuman, unshakeable, endlessly capable, and instead allowing ourselves to be tender, imperfect, and real.

Maybe it is in honoring our limits that something wiser emerges. Maybe surrendering to our humanness is not a failure of evolution, but its doorway. And perhaps it is not alone, but in community, in presence, in learning to hold one another without fixing or forcing, that we will meet what comes next and rise to it together.

I do not make proclamations anymore. But the fire is changing. And that is how I know the truth has arrived.