Right now, life feels impossibly unfair.

Not in a throwaway, everyday way. Not in the “traffic sucked” or “Starbucks got my coffee order wrong” kind of way. I mean the deep, hollowing kind of unfair. The kind that makes you question if anyone is actually keeping track up there, or if it’s all just random cruelty we dress up in platitudes to survive it.

My grandmother, my Nana, is dying.

Not someday. Not eventually. Now.

She has weeks left, maybe less, and there’s no fixing it, no miracle on the horizon. She’s tired. She’s ready. And somehow, I’m supposed to be ready too, but I’m not. How do you prepare yourself to lose one of the few people in your life who made you feel genuinely loved, safe, and seen?

What’s breaking me more than anything is this: she won’t be at my wedding.

She’s not holding on for it. She’s not trying to fight to be there.

And as much as I want to respect her choice and to let her go with grace instead of guilt, there’s a part of me that feels gutted. I wanted her there. I needed her there. Now I have to wrap my head around the fact that one of the biggest days of my life will come and go without her smile, her presence, her blessing in the room.

And she’s not the only one who won’t be there.

My mom won’t be there either because she’s gone.

She died, and with her went so many things I never got to say and never got to fix.

My dad won’t be there either, for reasons that are longer and messier than I can untangle in a single paragraph.

So as much as I want to be excited about planning this wedding, there’s an ache underneath all of it — an ache for the people who should have been standing by my side, and won’t be.

It would hurt no matter what, but it hits even harder because life has already been on fire for a long time.

I can mark the date when it all started to unravel: Leap Day, last year, when I got let go from a job by a bunch of mean girls who ganged up on me and made me the villain in rooms I didn’t even know I was being discussed in.

It wasn’t just a layoff.

It was brutal, personal, and mean in ways that blindsided me.

I really thought I had a future there.

For the first time in a long time, I let myself believe I had found a tech company where I could build something, where I could grow, where I could stop holding my breath waiting for the ground to fall out from under me.

And then the ground gave way anyway. Not because of performance, not because of anything I could fix, but because office politics and cruelty sometimes win.

That experience didn’t just break my heart.

It cracked something deeper.

Since then, I’ve been stuck in survival mode, hustling from one unstable contract to another, trying to rebuild a sense of safety I haven’t felt since.

And the truth is, I’m tired.

I’m tired of pretending that losing that job didn’t fundamentally shatter my trust, not just in employers, but in people.

Since that day, it’s been one thing after another. Health scares, job losses, financial chaos, relationship strain, grief layered on top of grief. It’s like someone pressed the survival mode button on me and forgot to turn it off.

I don’t have a dream job to pour myself into or some passion project to distract me.

I have a handful of contracts, some barely paying, some unstable, that are enough to keep my head above water but not enough to feel like I’m actually living. Survival mode isn’t a season anymore; it’s a lifestyle I never wanted and can’t seem to outgrow. I don’t even know what thriving would look like anymore.

And to top it off, the person who should be my rock is struggling to even stand himself.

I know Keith is doing the best he can, and I know he’s hurting too, but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel abandoned by him in ways I can’t even bring myself to say out loud.

It’s a special kind of hell to be drowning and realize the person you thought might save you is barely keeping themselves afloat.

No blame. Just reality.

Everything feels heavy.

Work, family, finances, love, grief. Every part of my life feels like it’s demanding more from me than I have to give. And there’s no break coming. No vacation. No relief squad. It’s just me, standing in the wreckage, trying to remember who I was before everything started burning.

In the middle of all of it, I’ve still been trying to keep promises to people I care about.

Yesterday, I posted about the website I’ve been building for Breana — a small thing, maybe, but right now it’s the kind of work that reminds me I can still finish something, still help someone else build something even when my own world feels like it’s collapsing.

I’m not writing this because I want advice or pity.

I’m not looking for “thoughts and prayers” or for someone to stitch a silver lining onto a sky that’s nothing but gray right now.

I’m writing it because it’s the truth. Because pretending otherwise would feel like another betrayal of myself in a season when I’m already losing so much.

I know life isn’t fair. I know no one gets out of it clean.

But it still feels cruel that some of us seem to get hit harder and longer and lonelier than others, and that we’re expected to be grateful for whatever scraps of peace we manage to wrestle from the chaos.

If you’re standing in your own version of this right now, carrying more than you should have to, wondering how much longer you’re supposed to keep going without collapsing, solidarity to you, too.

We’re not broken. We’re not weak. We’re not doing it wrong.

We’re just surviving the kind of season most people wouldn’t even talk about.

And we’re still here. Somehow. Even after all of it.