When I Can’t Get Back Up the Way I Used To
By DK Hillard
For most of my life, I believed there was nothing I couldn’t survive. I had reason to believe that.
I had lived through years when my body was failing, my spirit was worn thin, and life kept asking more of me than I thought I had left. I should have gone down more than once, but something in me kept reaching for the next way through.
I was someone who knew how to endure, keep moving, and come out the other side stronger, without considering the cost.
Now I’m in a place I’ve never known before.
This time, I’m not bouncing back, not finding a hidden reserve of energy or pushing through with a new plan. Every direction I turn seems to lead me right back to another roadblock. My body is weaker than it’s ever been. My energy is uncertain. The strategies that once helped me survive aren’t working anymore.
That has forced me to face a question I never expected to ask so directly.
What happens when the woman who always got back up isn’t sure she can get up at all?
I wonder if all those years of overcoming finally took their toll, because now I’m facing something I can’t push my way through. I don’t have a clean answer. I only know that I’m not the person I was. Some part of me is stronger than ever, but my body isn’t. It has carried too much for too long, and I can’t keep asking it to do what it used to do.
That’s painful to admit.
I knew who I was when strength meant endurance. How to keep moving, turn pain into beauty and purpose, and call it rising. But if I’m going to come through this intact, I have to stop asking the old version of me to carry me through.
This season of my life is asking me to stay present in the fear that I may not get back up, without shaming myself or forcing my way back into who I was. Simply to be with myself as I am, with love. If I rise again, it won’t be by abandoning my body. It will be by learning how to care for it.
This is where many of us struggle, especially women who have survived by being strong. We know how to keep going and hold things together. We become useful, capable, reliable, and brave because life required it from us.
But there may come a time when the old strength stops working. Not because we’ve failed, but because the next part of our lives can’t be lived through force.
That’s where I am now.
I’m not writing this from the other side. I‘m writing from the place where I’m still on the floor. I don’t know if my body will recover or what I’ll have to accept. I only know that I can’t abandon myself here because I’m not rising the way I once did.
So I’m beginning where I am. I’m feeding my body, resting without making myself earn it, caring for the body I have now, and letting this life matter before I have any assurance of what comes next.
That may not look like strength from the outside.
But to me, this feels like the beginning of something more honest than bouncing back.
It’s learning how to stay with myself when I can’t.
My writing, art, and the spaces I hold continue to grow from this shift toward presence and inner authority.You can learn more and stay connected at www.dkhillard.com.
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I found the honesty about not knowing what comes next really powerful. How do you keep hope alive when you have no clear idea whether your body will recover? Basketball Bros