It doesn’t always begin with you.
That’s the first thing to understand.
There are moments in your life where the ground shifts –
not because of anything you’ve done, or anything you said,
but because of others' choices made outside of your control.
Decisions you didn’t make or ask for.
By the time they reach you,
they don’t look like decisions at all –
they're circumstances, your reality, just the way things are.
And somehow, you’re the one left standing in them.
There’s a weight in that.
Not the kind that announces itself.
You find yourself having to start over,
working through a loss you're aware of
that doesn’t quite have a name,
accounting for an absence you're confronted with.
People move on –
with their certainties, their uncertainties, their lives.
And you remain, altered.
It would be easier if it belonged to you.
If there was a clear line between cause and effect –
something you could point to and say:
yes, this is where I stepped out of line.
But there isn’t a line.
Only the understanding that what you’re holding
originated elsewhere.
Some may call it consequence.
Some may call it circumstance.
But it’s mostly others’ karma.
Whatever you think the name is, the experience is the same:
to live, for a time, inside the aftermath
of something you didn’t create.
Life continues around you.
In small, almost unnoticeable acts, you start to rebuild –
not dramatic, not hopeful,
just practical. Mostly necessary.
The weight doesn’t vanish.
It shifts. It redistributes.
It becomes something you can set down, briefly,
without fear it takes everything with it.
And somewhere in that process – quietly, without announcement –
a separation forms.
Not between you and what happened –
that remains part of the landscape.
But between you and the idea
that you are defined by it.
Because even if it arrived through someone else’s actions,
even if it stayed longer than it should,
even if it stripped things back –
it's not the whole story.
It’s a story that remains unfinished –
one you’re still working through.
If these are words you recognise, you'll know.
– Ilana Estelle
