It's Not Just You

  There’s a quiet kind of loneliness that doesn’t come from actually being alone, it comes from being made to feel like you are. 

  It sneaks in through small phrases; casual ones. The kind that don’t sound harmful on the surface, but settle heavy in your chest later.
“It’s just you.”
“We don’t see this with other kids.”
“She’s the only one.”

Suddenly, what you’re navigating doesn’t feel like a shared human experience anymore. It feels like an exception. Like you’ve somehow wandered off the path everyone else is walking just fine.

Lately, I’ve felt that weight more than I expected. Navigating changes with my three-year-old, advocating for her in spaces that aren’t always built to understand her, hearing things framed in a way that isolates, instead of supports, has a way of making you question everything. Not just the situation, but yourself, your instincts, your child, your place in the world. *insert mental breakdown here*

 The truth is, the experience itself isn’t rare. It’s just rarely spoken about honestly. It reminds me of an old Buddhist story. A grieving parent, desperate to save their sick child, goes to a wise teacher asking for a cure. The teacher tells them to gather a specific set of ingredients, but there’s one condition: they must come from a home that has never known loss.

So the parent goes door to door. At each house, they ask, and at each house, they’re met with the same answer in different forms:
We’ve lost someone too. A parent. A sibling. A child. A piece of themselves. By the time they’ve knocked on enough doors, something shifts. Not the grief, but the isolation inside it. They return empty-handed, but not empty-hearted, because they finally understand: this pain, as personal as it feels, is not theirs alone.

I keep thinking about that.

Because the world has a way of telling us “it’s just you” when, in reality, it’s almost never just us. It’s systems that don’t flex, expectations that don’t fit, differences that aren’t fully understood yet. It’s stories that haven’t been shared loudly enough, and when we believe we’re the only ones, we shrink. We get quieter, and carry more than we should. #Guilty

But when we start knocking on doors, when we talk, when we listen, when we let ourselves be seen, we realize something softer, something steadier like, there are other parents navigating this, asking the same questions. Not identical stories, but familiar feelings. That can change everything. 

Because maybe the answer isn’t in proving that we’re the exception.
Maybe it’s in remembering that we’re not.

We’re not meant to carry hard things in isolation. We’re meant to lean, to reach, and to build circles instead of squares *wink*. To find the people who say, “me too,” instead of “just you.”

So if you’ve been made to feel like you’re the only one, you’re not. If you’re in the thick of something that feels too heavy to hold by yourself,
you don’t have to.

Knock on a door. Start a conversation. Let someone in.

Because being there for each other, really there, is how we stop feeling square in a world that keeps trying to box us in.

-Megs