The strangest part of that season is how quiet it was.
I had just moved to Lynchburg, thinking I was coming to be closer to family, only to watch them pack up and leave a few weeks later. One minute I belonged somewhere. The next minute I was a newcomer in a strange town with no community, no connections, and no real idea what came next.
And then COVID hit me like a freight train.
I wasn’t one of the lucky cases. I went down hard, and I stayed down. Three months flat. No strength. No breath. No voice. Just me and the four walls of an apartment I’d barely had time to memorize.
My business collapsed right along with me. So did my savings. Every bill felt like a countdown.
I remember lying there on the couch one afternoon, too weak to sit upright, and hearing the email ding—the notice that my rent had gone into collections. They were preparing eviction papers.
And there I was, unable to stand long enough to wash a dish.
Hope wasn’t even in the room with me. She wasn’t in the building. She wasn’t in the zip code.
There were days when the only sound in the whole apartment was the rattle of my own breathing and the old refrigerator humming like it was trying to keep me company.
I didn’t feel brave. I didn’t feel resilient.
I felt abandoned by life in a place where I didn’t know a single soul.
I learned to measure progress in inches, not miles.
Standing long enough to heat soup. Crawling back to bed before the blackout hit. Opening the blinds even though the light made me dizzy. Letting the shower run because I didn’t have the strength to get in it.
There was no inspiration. No epiphany. No glimmer of anything.
Just the stubborn fact that I was still here.
Some days I couldn’t even lift my phone to text someone from back home. I didn’t want to hear myself say the words out loud—I’m sick, I’m broke, I’m alone, and I might lose the only roof I have.
But every morning, my feet somehow found the floor.
Not with intention. Not with courage.
Just because gravity insisted.
And that became my rhythm: Let the body go where the heart can’t yet follow.
People talk a lot about hope.
But in that season, hope was too loud for me. Too bright. Too far away.
What kept me alive wasn’t hope.
It was motion. The smallest, slowest motion imaginable.
And here’s the thing—I’ll tell you later how I saved that apartment, how the tide eventually turned, how life found its way back in.
But in those early days, none of that was visible yet. I couldn’t even imagine it.
All I had was breath, the hum of a refrigerator, and a stubborn little spark in me that refused to vanish.
Sometimes survival looks exactly like that.
A woman in a new town, lying flat on her couch, inching forward in the dark until her heart finally remembers the way.
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Monica, what a dreadful time for you. I’m thankful for that that “tiny little spark” in you that lit the way for you to inch into your beautiful self. To write what emerges in your mind. I so enjoy the play of your creativity.
There are some days, usually in the morning, when i’m immobilized. I believe in that “tiny little spark” in me. I’ve learned on those tough mornings to sit. Simply sit. My coffee clutched in my left hand swallowing the warmth of hope to be guided. When I sit I wait for direction to surface. My guideline is to wait until that spark moves me to something I have the energy for. It could be anything such as reading in my book, self care to cleaning the bathroom!! To the need to muse to practicing my music to cleaning the glass of the coffee table. I trust my sit time to lead me towards some intentional action.
“Let the body go where the heart can’t yet follow.”
This is also how I’ve survived grief the past few months.
Thank you for these words.