Trying to Make It Work

On the quiet ways we stay in what no longer fits.

The hardest part about realizing a space no longer fits is not the moment of awareness itself, but the quiet and often unspoken recognition that even after you know it, even after you feel it in your body with a clarity that is difficult to deny, you are still, in subtle and persistent ways, trying to make it work anyway.

There is a space between knowing and moving that can stretch far longer than we would like to admit, a space where awareness has already taken root but action has not yet followed, and in that space, we begin to negotiate with what we already understand to be true, convincing ourselves that perhaps the discomfort is temporary, that perhaps the misalignment can be adjusted, that perhaps if we just shift a few things around us, we can continue to remain where we are.

I have lived in that space more times than I can count, and when I sit with it honestly, I can trace its origins back to places in my life where making something work was not simply a preference but a necessity, where the environments around me were fixed in ways that did not account for my needs, and the only available response was to adapt, to adjust, to find a way to move within what could not be changed.

I remember, in ways that still feel present in my body, walking to school in shoes that had worn all the way through, where the sole no longer existed as a barrier between my feet and the ground, and when it rained, the water would seep through the bottom and into my socks, and instead of naming that as discomfort or lack, I learned to transform the experience into something I could hold more easily, turning it into a game that I called “squish, squash, squish,squash,” because if I could make it playful, I could make it livable.

I remember standing in winter with a coat that had thinned over time, its ability to hold warmth diminished by years of wear, and instead of acknowledging the cold that was pressing against my body, I would repeat to myself, over and over again, that I was not cold, that I was fine, that I could endure it, because the alternative required a kind of vulnerability that was not available to me at the time.

These moments were not isolated; they formed a pattern, and that pattern became a way of being, a learned response that taught me how to survive within environments that were not designed to adjust for me, and over time, that survival strategy evolved into something that looked like strength, something that looked like resilience, something that allowed me to move through spaces with a kind of adaptability that others would often name as a gift.

And in many ways, it was.

It allowed me to become someone who could navigate multiple worlds, who could shift my cadence, my posture, my presence depending on where I was and who I was with, who could operate in environments that ranged from corporate offices to street corners without losing the ability to function, who could take what was given and find a way to make it work, even when it did not naturally fit.

But what I did not understand at the time was that the very ability that allowed me to survive in those environments would later become the thing that made it difficult to recognize when a space was no longer aligned for me.

Because when making it work becomes your default response, you stop asking whether it should.