The Trapdoor
Beneath Stability

It's 5:35 on a Thursday and I'm walking through my door trying to convince myself I'm okay.

I've been in Medicare training for about two weeks now. Two more to go — some nesting days, some out of nesting, still technically training. It was supposed to be three weeks but Memorial Day stretched it to four. And honestly? The material isn't the problem. I know I can pass this.

What scares me is everything else.

The stuff that falls out of the sky without warning.

Because the one thing that could actually derail me isn't a test. It's attendance. Miss more than fifteen hours and I'm out. So far I've missed about four and a half, maybe five — four of those were FMLA, unavoidable. One was me oversleeping. One hour. One stupid mistake that cost me more mental real estate than I can afford right now.

So I keep telling myself: stay on your P's and Q's. Don't miss anything else. Just make it through.

And I know how simple that sounds.

Wake up. Show up. Do the job. Come home. Repeat.

That's it. That's the whole plan.

But here's the thing — I don't trust "simple" anymore. The last four years burned that out of me. Because it's always something. A foot infection. A random crisis. Something you couldn't have predicted, couldn't have planned for, couldn't have stopped. And yeah, I have FMLA, so my job is technically protected — but I also have to pass training, because we're being certified for dual roles. So "protected" doesn't feel protected. It feels like I'm standing on a trapdoor, and I never know when the floor drops.

I'm trying not to freak out.

But if I'm being honest? I'm right on the edge of it.

I did the math the other night — like I always do when I'm trying to calm myself down. Went through everything: what I can pay, what I can push, what absolutely has to be covered. And the wild part is I actually found a place that's a genuinely good deal. Most of what I looked at was way more expensive. I got lucky — $700 unfurnished, $1,100 furnished. Nice place. Solid price.

And I'm still struggling.

Still.

That makes me feel sick. Because I know my landlord is probably fed up. I don't want to be that tenant. I don't want to be the problem. But I've been homeless before, and that fear lives in my body now — not just in my head. It's the kind of fear that doesn't reason with you. It just reminds you, over and over: you're one bad week away from losing everything.

I don't sleep right. Some nights my brain won't stop spinning — how do I get to work, how do I cover rent, how do I not end up on the street again — and I'm awake until three, four in the morning. Other nights exhaustion just takes me down mid-thought. I'll sit down for five minutes and disappear for hours. Then I oversleep. Then I hate myself for it.

It feels like there's no winning position.

Something else has been sitting with me that I haven't really put into words until now.

I don't feel like myself.

I'm not sure the person I was before all of this is still here. The last four years changed something in me that I can't fully name yet — and honestly, I still don't know how I survived them.

At least twice I had guns pulled on me. I've been beaten. Attacked violently — once by one person, another time by three, years apart, no through-line connecting them except that they happened to me. I've been chased at night. I've had my head stomped in. I've been stolen from so many times I lost count. Kicked out of hotels for nothing. Raped.

Even typing that out, it doesn't feel real. It feels like I'm describing someone else's life.

But it's mine.

And none of that — none of it — was the hardest part.

The hardest part was the silence.

Not a complicated silence. Just the absence of contact. The kind of quiet that tells you someone has decided you don't need to be checked on. That you're not worth a phone call. That you've become, in some very practical way, not real to them anymore.

I'm talking about my immediate family.

I was in the ICU twice during those years. Once with shingles. Once with pneumonia and sepsis — two situations where I was apparently close enough to dying that it should have mattered.

Nobody came.

Not to the ER. Not the hospital. Not the ICU.

Nobody.

One of those times was during COVID, and I can intellectually understand the fear. I can follow the logic. But I can't feel it. Because what if that had been it? What if I'd died in there, alone, and the last thing I knew was that nobody showed up?

That question doesn't resolve. It just sits in you and rots something.

Here's the part that's strange, though:

I still love them.

I'm not angry in the way people expect me to be. I don't have a list of grievances I'm waiting to read at some confrontation. If my mom got sick tomorrow, if my dad needed help, if my sister needed me to show up — I would. Because they're my family. That part of me didn't die even when it probably should have.

But the relationship is altered forever. And I've made my peace with that, mostly.

If I see them again — holidays, whatever — I'll get a hotel. Not out of punishment. Just because something in me won't let me sleep under a roof that wasn't available when I had nowhere to go. It's petty, maybe. But it's honest.

I still want to see my niece and nephew.

Part of me wants to disappear completely, just cut every thread, stop hoping for anything from anyone. But I'm not built that way. So instead I live in this in-between — still loving people, still missing them, still carrying the hurt, not knowing what to do with it.

What I think most people don't understand about years of survival mode is that the real damage isn't logistical. It's not just the money or the housing or the danger.

It's what it does to your sense of worth.

When you feel alone long enough — truly alone, in the way that makes you invisible to the people who should see you — you start to believe you're alone because you deserve to be. You start feeling replaceable. Disposable. Like something the world can afford to lose.

And then the real battle starts. The internal one.

Because at some point you realize you can't fix other people. You can't make family love you the way you needed them to. You can't force anyone to show up. All you can do is deal with what's still living inside you — the damage, the doubt, the grief that doesn't have a clean shape.

I know that logically. I know the work is internal.

But I also know, honestly, that I can't do this alone. Not fully. Not in any practical, hands-on way that I can manage by myself. What I need feels bigger than what I can reach. Some kind of widening. Some shift in perception that I don't know how to manufacture. I believe in God, in the Creator, in something — and right now that's the only direction I can point toward when I try to imagine healing.

I don't know how to say that without sounding like I've given up.

I haven't.

I'm still here. Still showing up to training. Still doing the math. Still fighting for something that looks like stability, even when I'm terrified it's going to collapse again.

Tonight I needed to get this out because I could feel it building — the kind of pressure that, if I kept sitting with it, was going to become full sobbing, alone in my apartment at 5:35 on a Thursday.

So here it is.

Raw. Messy. True.

I don't have a tidy ending. I'm not going to wrap this with a lesson or a list of takeaways. All I've got is: I'm still here. Still going. Still hoping that somehow the part of me that learned to expect abandonment will eventually learn what it feels like to be held.

That's the whole prayer right now.