POST 17: “I Miss You” — How I Found My Way Back

There’s a version of rock bottom that doesn’t look dramatic.

No crisis hotline, no intervention, no visible falling apart. Just a quiet Sunday in August where you’re sitting in your apartment, and the stillness that used to feel like rest now feels like evidence. Evidence that maybe nothing matters. That the world would just… keep going. That you could disappear and the gap you’d leave would close up quickly, like water.

I wasn’t suicidal. I want to be clear about that. But I was standing at the edge of a thought I’d never entertained before — what if I just… didn’t? — and I was standing there long enough to get comfortable. That scared me more than anything else had in a long time.

To understand how I got there, you have to understand the year leading up to it.

After the sarcoidosis diagnosis, I spent months just trying to survive my own body. And just when I was starting to find my footing again, my mother got sick and needed surgery. She came to stay with me for three months. Three months of caretaking, of navigating a relationship that has never been simple, of being needed in ways that left no room for my own recovery. By the time she left, I was hollowed out.

Then, somewhere in the middle of all of it, someone handed me a baby squirrel. A few days old, abandoned, no rescue willing to take him. So I did what I do — I said yes. I fed him around the clock, kept him warm, watched him slowly grow fur, watched his little tail start to fill in. He was maybe a week away from opening his eyes for the first time when he died.

A week away.

I grieved him more than made sense to some people, probably. But grief doesn’t negotiate with logic. He was something small and alive that I had chosen to show up for every single day, and then he was gone. And I think losing him cracked something open that I’d been holding shut for a long time.

By August, I had been alone — truly alone — for longer than I realized. Not just physically, but in that deeper way where you stop expecting connection because you’ve stopped reaching for it. My meetup group had been dormant for over a year. Friends had quietly drifted. I was decompress-scrolling through phone games at midnight instead of sleeping, because at least that required nothing from me.

And then one day I just… called her. My friend. The one who runs the meetup group with me.

I didn’t tell her about the void. I didn’t explain the August darkness or the squirrel or the three months with my mother or the sarcoidosis fatigue or any of it. I just said, “Hey. Long time no see. I miss you. We’re paying for this meetup subscription and it’s just sitting there — what if we revamp the group? I’m finally feeling a little better. Let’s do something.”

That was it. No grand confession. No dramatic reaching out. Just — I miss you. Let’s do something.

She said yes immediately.

We threw a little happy hour. Nothing fancy — just people in a room, catching up, laughing. But something shifted that night. People started texting after. That was so fun, let’s do it again. My guy friend reached out — there’s a hockey game, you want to go? We’ll do Korean BBQ after. And that became our thing. Every game, every Korean BBQ, a little more of myself came back online.

It wasn’t a linear recovery. It wasn’t a montage. It was just — one phone call, one happy hour, one hockey game at a time, until one day I looked up and realized I was actually enjoying my life again.

And that was fucking great.

I think about that August a lot. About how close I came to just… staying in the stillness. About how the thing that pulled me out wasn’t a revelation or a breakthrough — it was a phone call about a meetup subscription.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. Not a grand gesture. Not finally having the right words. Just reaching out to someone and saying the simplest, truest thing you can manage.

I miss you.

If you’re in your own August right now — I see you. You don’t have to explain the void. You don’t have to have it figured out. You just have to find one person and say the smallest true thing.

The rest has a way of following.

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