Inspired by both a friend and my personal experience as we both struggled to answer this question after devastating heartache. 

You want me to say,
“I’m okay.”

But I can’t.

The words catch in my throat –
exhausted
from carrying a lie
that was never meant
to be so heavy.

I study the word,
turn it over in my mind,
try to find a way to make it true,
and set it back down.

It doesn’t belong to me anymore.
I am not okay.

“No” is not the answer either.

It implies
I know where the wound begins,
that I can point to the place
where everything unraveled.

But I can’t.

I only know
that everything feels wrong.
That every thought is too loud,
every breath trembles
on the edge of breaking,
every hour asks more of me
than I have left to give.

Every thought,
every memory,
every moment,
every piece of me
feels tangled together
until nothing can be separated
from the ache.

How do you explain a pain
that doesn’t fit inside language?

How do you describe drowning
to someone standing safely on the shore?

The heaviness pulls me underwater,
these emotions drown out all other thoughts,
everything feels like too much –
all consuming.

There comes a point
when every answer becomes too small,
every explanation falls apart,
and every word loses its meaning.

Language has edges,
but suffering has none.

It spills beyond every word,
beyond every explanation,
until all that’s left
is the quiet truth.

“I’m surviving”

Not because it’s living,
but because – for now –
surviving is the only answer
when the pain is too vast,
too deep,
too immense,
to be spoken at all.

©2026 Life in Chaos/M.Stiles
All rights reserved.