How Do I Keep Going When Life Keeps Hitting Me?

Some seasons, the hits don't stop. One thing breaks, then another, then the thing you were leaning on. You get up, and life knocks you down again, and somewhere inside a voice says, quietly, I can't keep doing this.

I'm not going to hand you a poster that says "stay positive." When you're in it, that advice is almost insulting.

But let me give you something I actually use. Call it zooming out.

When a storm hits, attention zooms all the way in. The problem fills the whole screen of your mind; it becomes the entire world; there's no room for anything else. That isn't weakness — it's just what attention does under pressure. But you can, gently, zoom out. Not to deny the storm — to stop being only the storm. Step back far enough and you notice: there is the pain, and there is the one who is aware of the pain. The wave is enormous. But there is also the water it moves through — and that part of you was never actually drowning.

This isn't about going numb or pretending it doesn't hurt. It's about finding the one thing in you the storm cannot reach. Almost everything can be taken — money, plans, people, health, the future you imagined. But the simple awareness reading these words, the bare sense of being here — no loss has ever touched that. It was here before the storm, it's here during it, and it will be here after. That is the anchor. When you can't hold anything else, you can rest there.

I won't pretend a paragraph carries you through grief or ruin. But this — learning to zoom out, and to feel the one thing no storm can take — is something to hold when there's nothing else. My book is, in large part, about finding that anchor and learning to trust it.

You are being hit. But you are not only the thing being hit.

If life has been relentless lately, It Was Never You was written for exactly these seasons. abhijeetrai.com.

If you're in real crisis and thoughts of harming yourself are present, please don't carry it alone — reach out to someone you trust or a local helpline. You matter beyond any storm.