Written for where you actually are.

The gap between how you were told this would feel and how it actually feels can be enormous — and there is little permission to say so out loud.

Everyone says these are the best years of your life, which makes it harder to admit you are barely holding it together.

You are good in a crisis. That is exactly why nobody notices when you are in one.

Not the therapy where you spend the first twenty minutes explaining why you cannot move out.

A great deal of what arrives here has been carried competently for years. Competence is exactly why nobody noticed.

Most couples do not arrive after a catastrophe. They arrive after two years of the same conversation going nowhere.

Fourteen days on, fourteen days off, and a counselling system that assumes you can make Tuesday at four every week.

Nobody applies for this job. It accretes — one appointment, then the medications, then everything.

Everyone thinks they know what teaching is like because everyone went to school. The version you are living — the composition of one actual classroom, at 8:40 on a Tuesday — is another thing entirely.

Good salary, good benefits, ergonomic chair — and a nervous system that has spent three years bracing for the next reorg email. Both things are true, which is exactly why it feels unsayable.

Where the argument can happen in the language the argument happened in — and the in-laws do not have to be explained first.

Not a page about difficult parents. A page about two people who love each other and have stopped being able to hear one another.