The written loom

The Things That Keep Growing Without Our Permission

There is a plant on my balcony that I keep meaning to give up on.. It is not dying, exactly.. just indecisive. Every few months it sends out a hopeful green shoot, then seems to change its mind halfway, drying at the tips as if the effort of existing were suddenly too much. I move it from one corner to another, trying different combinations of sun and shade. I test the soil with my fingers, add compost, whisper encouragement that is part joke, part plea..

“If you don’t want to be here,” I tell it, “at least make up your mind.”

It does not, of course. It simply continues in this in-between state: not quite thriving, not quite gone..

For a long time I thought this plant annoyed me because it reflected some flaw in my gardening skills. Lately, I suspect it unsettles me for a different reason: it looks uncomfortably like real life. Not the glossy, before-and-after kind, but the long middle, where there are no clear lines between progress and pause, between growing and simply getting through..

Several months ago, I wrote about a period in my life when I left my career to care for my mother as her dementia progressed. At the time, that decision felt like uprooting myself completely.. I stepped out of the timeline I had been quietly following, promotions, projects, plans drafted a year in advance, and into days organized around medications, appointments, and the recurring question, “Who are you again?”

Back then, I was mostly preoccupied with what I had walked away from. The steady income. The identity that fit neatly into small talk. The ability to answer “What are you working on?” with something that sounded like forward motion..

Now, with a little more distance and a lot more fatigue, I find myself paying attention to something I barely noticed at the beginning: the way certain parts of my life kept growing even when I had stopped tending to them in any deliberate way.. The invitations I had to decline but that somehow kept coming. The relationships I assumed would fade but didn’t. And, quietly, the parts of myself that were rearranging while I was busy believing everything was at a standstill..

It turns out that not all growth looks like effort.. Some of it looks like endurance..

What Keeps Going When You Stop Pushing

I used to believe that a good life was mostly the result of careful management, of calendars and goals and habits and the right books stacked on my bedside table. If I planned well, if I tried hard enough, I could keep everything moving in roughly the direction I wanted..

Caregiving rearranged that belief..

There is nothing tidy about days punctuated by wandering, by repeated questions, by the slow shrinking of a personality you once leaned on.. You can’t project-manage confusion. You can’t schedule a moment of recognition. You can’t put “be patient when accused of stealing her own handbag” into a task manager and tick it off when done..

And yet, despite the apparent chaos, some strange kind of order emerged..

Neighbors I barely knew started checking in more often, not with speeches but with practical kindness: a bag of groceries left at the door, a short text saying, “I’m at the supermarket, do you need anything?” Friends who had once known me primarily in the context of work began to know me instead as the daughter who was tired but still showing up.. Our conversations shifted from launches and deadlines to the kind of intimacy that grows when you have no energy left to impress..

None of this was strategic. I had no bandwidth to “nurture my network.” I was not consciously “investing in relationships.” I was simply too exhausted to perform competence all the time, and in that space, some people quietly stepped closer. Others drifted away, and that, too, was a kind of sorting..

I had assumed that stepping away from my career meant turning away from growth. What I didn’t anticipate was that other forms of growth would keep unfolding even while I was looking elsewhere, like the way a tree continues thickening its trunk whether or not anyone is keeping count of the rings..

We talk a lot about what we build.. We talk less about what is being built in us while we are busy surviving..

The Unmeasured Skills

There are skills I used to list on my CV: project management, strategic planning, communication..

There are skills I have now that don’t fit easily into a bullet point..

• Like the ability to answer the same frightened question six times in ten minutes without allowing my voice to harden..
• Or.. The capacity to notice the precise moment when irritation is about to spill into unkindness, and to step away, breathe, and begin again..
• The fluency to translate medical jargon into language my mother can tolerate without panicking.
• The intuition to recognize when “I’m fine” really means “Please don’t leave yet.”

None of these will show up in performance reviews. No one awards a certificate for “didn’t slam the door after the fourth accusation.” And yet, they are a form of growth so demanding it sometimes leaves me shaking..

If you had asked me years ago how I was developing myself, I might have pointed to courses, certifications, difficult projects at work. Now, I catch myself thinking in a quieter way: What capacities have expanded in me because life gave me no other option?

Patience that stretches a few breaths longer than it used to.. A deeper tolerance for uncertainty.. The humbling realization that I am not, in fact, the kind of person who can do everything alone, and that seeking help is not evidence of failure but of belonging..

This is not growth I would have chosen as a development plan.. No one would. It comes without applause, without pay raises, without proof that can be displayed in a portfolio..

Still, it counts..

When Identity No Longer Fits on a Business Card

One of the strangest parts of stepping away from work was how naked introductions began to feel..

“What do you do?” used to be a question I could answer on autopilot. Job title. Company. Maybe a brief description of my role, rehearsed enough times that it slid off my tongue without effort..

After I left, I found myself hesitating..

Do I say I’m a former Personal Assistant? Do I say I’m a full-time caregiver? Do I try to distract with something vague, “I’m between things at the moment”, and hope we move on quickly?

For a while, I treated my lack of a neat label as a personal failure, evidence that I had stepped off the path and was now wandering somewhere undefined. It felt, at times, like being a house whose front door had been removed like I didn’t quite know how anyone was supposed to enter..

Months later, I see it a little differently..

There is a peculiar freedom in not being easily categorized. Without the ready-made script, conversations sometimes move more quickly to what actually matters: What occupies your days? What are you learning to live with? What keeps you up at night? What keeps you going anyway?

It is uncomfortable, yes. Vulnerable, often. But it has also revealed how narrow our cultural imagination can be around what counts as a “real” life. We know how to admire ambition that produces visible achievements. We are less practiced at honoring the kind that quietly sustains another human being..

I am beginning to think of identity less as a job description and more as a set of ongoing verbs: caring, listening, adapting, enduring, noticing, hoping. These are not things you can print on a business card, but they are, increasingly, the ones I recognize as mine..

The Myth of the Correct Choice

People sometimes tell me, usually with kindness, that what I did was brave.

“You made such a courageous decision,” they say, as though I had stood at a crossroads with perfect visibility and chosen the narrow, noble path..

The truth was messier.. There was no quiet inner certainty, no moment where a voice from the sky handed me a script titled “The Right Thing To Do.” There was only a series of days where the gap between my mother’s needs and my availability grew wider, and something in me refused to let that gap become a canyon..

I did not feel brave.. I felt cornered by reality..

When we look back on big decisions, we are tempted to label them, like.. sacrifice, calling, mistake, turning point. These words can be comforting. They give shape to something that, at the time, felt like stumbling forward in the dark..

But in the months since, I have become more suspicious of tidy labels. They tend to erase the part that matters most: the uncertainty we carried while making the choice. The nights of spreadsheets open on one side of the screen and medical notes on the other. The calculations that are not purely financial but also emotional: What will I regret more? What can I live with? What can I not live with?

We talk as though the value of a choice can be measured only by its outcomes.. Did the person recover? Did your finances survive? Did your career bounce back? when there is also another measure: Did you remain in conversation with your own conscience? Did you respond to the call that only you could hear, however faint and inconvenient it was?

I still don’t know what to name my decision. Some days it feels like an act of love. Other days, it feels like an ongoing vulnerability I willingly walked into. Most days, it feels simply like life: complicated, irreducible to slogans.

What I am learning is that the absence of a clean label does not mean the choice was wrong. It means it was real.

Quiet Growth, Slow Recognition

If someone had taken a photograph of my life at the beginning of this season and compared it to a photograph now, they might struggle to see the difference.

I still spend many days at home. My mother’s illness has not resolved into a neat arc, it continues, uneven and unpredictable. My bank account does not tell a triumphant story. My social media profile looks much the same as it did when I left, just older and slightly dusty..

On the surface, it would be easy to say: nothing has changed.

But that is the thing about certain kinds of growth, they do not announce themselves in obvious ways.. They accumulate quietly, like the imperceptible strengthening of a muscle you have used every day without thinking..

I notice it in small, almost private ways:

• The conversations I can now have with others in similar situations, filled not only with sympathy but with a grounded understanding of what their days might look like.
• The lessening of a particular kind of panic when plans fall apart,  having lived in the land of contingency, I am slightly less shocked when life does not consult my calendar.
• The tenderness I feel toward people I might once have judged for “not being very productive.” I have a fuller sense now of how much invisible labor a person might be carrying..

None of this makes the hard parts easier. It does not pay the bills or erase the grief of watching a parent fade in front of you. It does, however, give a different texture to the story I tell myself about my own life..

Instead of “I pressed pause and everything stopped,” another narrative has emerged: While one part of my life was being dismantled, another was quietly being constructed..

I was not only losing.. I was also becoming..

On Living Like a Perennial

Lately, when I look at my indecisive balcony plant, I try to be a little kinder..

Maybe it is not failing.. Maybe it is doing exactly what it knows how to do: hold on when conditions are inconsistent, send out small experiments of growth when there is just enough energy, retreat when there isn’t..

Perennials, I recently learned, spend a surprising amount of effort growing what we cannot see, root systems that delve deeper each year, storing energy for seasons that haven’t arrived yet. The showiest blooms are brief compared to all the underground work that makes them possible..

It is an unglamorous image, but it comforts me..

We like the drama of radical transformation, the stories where someone rips up their life and emerges with a completely new one. Those stories exist, of course. But in between are the slower, murkier stories: of people who adapt without headlines, who reshape their days around illness, aging, financial strain, or the quiet exhaustion of simply being human in a complicated world..

Their lives may not look dramatically different from the outside. Inside, however, entire landscapes shift..

Roots thicken. Priorities reorder themselves. The question “What do I want to achieve?” loosens its grip and is joined, sometimes overshadowed, by “Who do I want to be for the people who depend on me?” and “How do I remain gentle with myself while I try?”

This, too, is a form of flourishing..

Not the ornamental kind that wins admiration, but the stubborn kind that returns each season, even if the winter felt unforgiving.. The kind that does not ask permission to keep growing..

Still Here..

If I were to answer, honestly, how I am these days, I would say: I am tired. I am changed. I am not at all where I expected to be. I am learning to live with responsibilities I did not choose and love I would not trade..

I am also, in a way I could not have predicted, still growing..

Not in straight lines. Not toward a clear, impressive summit. More like a plant that sends roots sideways as often as upward, finding unexpected pockets of nourishment in conversations, in small joys, in the brief lucid moments when my mother looks at me with recognition and says my name the way she used to..

Growth, I am discovering, is not always about improving ourselves. Sometimes it is about enlarging the space inside us where reality can live without breaking us apart..

We can be shaped by tenderness and by difficulty. We can be held up by the care we receive and by the mysterious instinct in us that keeps standing up one more time, even when no one is watching..

So when I look at the parts of my life that seem stalled, I try to remember: not everything that is changing will be visible yet. Some rings in the trunk only become obvious years later, when you look back and trace them with your fingers..

For now, it is enough to say: I am still here.. Not as I was. Not as I imagined I would be.. But here, all the same..

And somewhere beneath the surface, something in me is still, stubbornly, growing..

Tatiana,