Before the Next Chapter

There was a period of my life where I read every night before bed. It was a small, dependable part of my routine that required very little effort, and I was often picking up my book without even thinking about it.  

At the time, much of my life felt decided. University was finishing, travelling was planned, and the next steps were seemingly already written. My mind could afford to wander into fiction because it trusted that things were held. I viewed life with a childlike sense of optimism and excitement, safe in the confines of plans that I'd forgotten had an expiration date.  

With university over and travelling commencing, my routine shifted, but the adrenaline during this period of life kept me moving forward. In being so far away from home, it had felt like my previous routine was merely on pause, not over and awaiting me to choose the next step when I returned.  

Unfortunately for me, the high of travelling would only last so long. Like all things: what goes up, must come down. And I came crashing down, hard. I returned home to a job I had outgrown, navigating a relationship coming to an end, and the most unexpected, devastating family loss I could never have been prepared for.  

Everything I had been moving towards fell away at once, and I was left with a strange, hollow kind of quiet. A sort of emptiness. A sense that the scaffolding of my life had been removed before I knew how to stand without it. I wasn’t only grieving people or plans, but a version of myself who had known where she was going.  

Somewhere amongst all this, I stopped reading altogether. Was this because it was a ritual connected so heavily with the person I was before? Was I avoiding it that in case I failed, I'd have confirmation that I’d lost something? That I’d lost myself? Had I let myself become lazy? Distracted?  

I couldn’t make sense of these feelings, but I found myself thinking about Death of a Naturalist, the Seamus Heaney poem I had studied at school. In it, the shift isn’t marked by a single loss, but by an awakening: the moment when fascination gives way to awareness, when the world grows louder, heavier, and more real.  

Reading it again, I recognise the feeling of having crossed into a sort of ‘after’; a second stage of life where nothing is held automatically, and everything must be faced with open eyes. The innocence I had felt before tipped into a new, heavier, awareness of the world around me. Immersion was going to require safety, and my nervous system wasn’t quite ready to let go. 

Without my previous emotional and structural certainty, I can now see that my mind has been doing exactly what it was built to do: stay alert, rehearse the past, and try to protect me from further loss. In asking myself to switch off completely, I was asking too much of a system without a clear next chapter. I was not at the end of something, but right in the heart of the unsettling space between what had been, and what had yet to take shape. 

Making peace with that space has taken time. I have had to learn that being between stories does not mean I am stuck, and that presence did not have to look like certainty. I was not broken or behind, or lazy or distracted. I was simply more awake, carrying more weight, and learning how to move without a script.  

I am no longer trying to ‘fix’ this state. Perhaps this in-between was not something to overcome, but something to sit with. A pause rather than a failure. A holding pattern rather than an ending.  

Not everything in life needs to move forward at once. Some things can be returned to quietly, without expectation.  

There is something steadying in that thought. In allowing life to remain unfinished. 

So, while I wait for my next story to form, I think it's about time I go read one.