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I spent five months bracing for impact.
I don’t mean that as a metaphor, I mean… I spent five months preparing for the worst—
In a state of lockdown and hyper-aware, with my jaw tight, eyes darting, surveying everything around me, breath hitched. Ready to run, ready to make impact.
Ready to be hurt.
It wasn’t conscious, it was something deep within me brewing and eventually taking over. I felt I needed to be prepared, just in case—and I had trouble parsing out if it was intuition or anxiety most days. Even now, I get lost wondering what was really going on.
Because, truthfully—I am intuitive. I do know things, I do sense things… and for five months I wobbled between catastrophizing and something else that I don’t even want to fully acknowledge now, because it would hurt too much.
Regardless, I braced.
And then the thing I was bracing for, happened.
Not in any of the ways I’d mentally prepared for—but worse. The heartbreak, the grief, the disorientation, the isolation, the silence… all of it beyond anything I had imagined.
I learned, the hard way, that bracing didn’t do shit. Rationing my joy didn’t do shit. Exit strategies and contingency plans didn’t do shit.
None of it saved me any ounce of pain or anguish. It didn’t absolve me from grief. If anything, it made it worse—because to top off the endless river of sadness coursing through me with every breath, I now also had the annoying asshole in my head going… we knew. We knew. WE KNEW.
A punishment for my prepping, not a reward.
I’ve heard this idea before—hell, I’ve said it—but bracing for impact just means experiencing the impact twice. And yet, there I was… no, here I am. Deep in the grief that I’ve cycled through countless times over the last five months and it hurts just as bad every single time.
In retrospect, I see how seductive the bracing was. It gave me the illusion of control—the thing I crave most in this lifetime, apparently. I can see how I believed that if I thought about it hard enough, hurt preemptively enough, I could mitigate the damage. I could out-negotiate fate.
But fate (which to be blunt, I don’t think I fully believe in anyway) doesn’t play by those rules.
Mythology knows this. Take Cassandra—the Trojan priestess gifted with foresight by Apollo and cursed never to be believed. She saw the destruction of Troy coming. She warned them. And no one listened. There’s something painfully familiar about that—carrying a knowing, a dread, a scream locked in your chest while the world keeps marching toward disaster like it’s fine. She wasn’t wrong. But being right didn’t save her. That’s the thing about foresight: it doesn’t come with agency. And sometimes, it’s just another form of suffering.
Bracing is its own kind of hubris—the idea that we can think our way out of what’s meant to unfold.
I share this not from some enlightened place beyond fear. Rather, as someone who is still trying to unlearn the habit of contracting every time life feels uncertain. I share it as someone who’s living in close proximity to grief and is still learning how to let life be good—or even just okay—without assuming that means something bad is coming next. I share it as someone stepping into a season of so, so many unknowns and is trying to be open to magic versus armored and defensive.
I’m trying something different. I’m releasing my shoulders on purpose, I’m loosening my jaw. I’m breathing deeply and redirecting when my mind wants to run mental scenarios of every what-if possible—reminding myself that those are all problems I can’t solve because they don’t exist.
I’m practicing presence.
Presence is not a passive act—at least not for me. It’s a choice to stay in my body and in the moment, and it’s a choice I have to keep coming back to. It’s not avoidance or bypassing or putting your head in the sand, but rather a conscious decision to stay in my power, to focus on what I can actually control (turns out, very little).
This way of operating has me moving slower, noticing more—my breath, the light, the smell of my coffee, the birds outside. It has me noticing how life persists, the world keeps turning… and somehow that helps me more than having an ‘if this, then that’ formula for every possible outcome.
When you stop bracing, you leave room for something else—you leave room to let the light in. And maybe that won’t protect me from ever feeling pain again, but it makes the moment that I’m in a bit more bearable—and I’ll take what I can get these days.
