Still Showing Up

Faith, Fear, Grief, and the Quiet Fight to Keep Going

Yadelkys Mejia - May 15, 2026

At night, everything gets louder. Not the world, not the people around me, but my own mind. The kind of loud that follows you into silence, that sits beside you when the room is dark and everyone else is asleep. I have tried to give it up. I have tried convincing myself that I did not want to continue into another overwhelming day. Another morning of carrying thoughts too heavy for someone my age. Another day of pretending I understood where my life was going when half the time I felt completely lost inside of it.

There were moments I even said the words out loud: “I don’t have faith anymore.” And maybe I believed it when I said it. Maybe I wanted to believe it because losing faith almost feels easier than carrying disappointment over and over again. But life has a strange way of exposing what still lives inside of you. It throws you into storms, into swirls of confusion, pain, loneliness, heartbreak, fear, and uncertainty, and somehow, somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, you realize you are still standing. Breathing. Trying. Hoping. Even if only a little.

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I used to wonder why we learn formulas in school. Why we spend years solving equations we thought would never matter outside a classroom. But now I think life itself is an equation. Every problem has variables we cannot control, missing pieces we spend years trying to understand, and formulas we do not learn until we survive them. Sometimes the answer does not come immediately. Sometimes you fail the same lesson over and over before understanding what it was trying to teach you. And sometimes faith is not this giant beautiful certainty everyone talks about. Sometimes faith is simply waking up when your heart is tired. Sometimes faith is surviving the night. Sometimes faith is showing up even when you cannot see the outcome.

I do not fully understand my own future. At twenty one years old, I feel caught between who I used to be and who I am trying to become. There are days I think too much about tomorrow. About whether I will leave Miami one day and create an entirely new life for myself somewhere far away from everything familiar. About whether the people I love will still walk beside me in the future I imagine. About whether I am building a life or just trying not to drown inside one. People say not to think so far ahead, but how do you not think about the future when your entire heart is trying to survive long enough to reach it?

I have loved people deeply. Enough to fight for them, enough to wait, enough to hurt myself trying to understand them. But one of the hardest things I have learned is that love cannot survive where fear lives forever. And sometimes the saddest realization is understanding that someone can mean everything to you and still not belong in the life you are trying to build. That truth hurts in ways I cannot fully explain. Because I know what it feels like to want someone to choose you completely while also realizing you may eventually have to choose yourself instead.

There are also pieces of me that still carry grief quietly. The kind of grief that changes you without announcing itself. The kind that sits in your chest long after the world expects you to move on. Some losses are not visible. Some heartbreaks happen internally. Some dreams disappear before they even fully begin. And even then, life keeps moving. The clock does not pause for your sadness. The sun still rises. People still expect answers from you. And somehow you still have to continue becoming a person while carrying parts of yourself that feel broken.

But I think that is what makes people human. Not perfection. Not certainty. Just endurance. The quiet decision to continue despite not knowing how everything will turn out. I do not think strength always looks powerful. Sometimes strength looks like crying in private and still handling your responsibilities the next morning. Sometimes it looks like questioning God and still praying anyway. Sometimes it looks like admitting you are lost while continuing to walk forward.

Maybe faith was never about seeing the whole path clearly. Maybe faith is simply taking another step while standing in darkness. Maybe it is continuing to show up for a life that has hurt you because somewhere deep inside yourself you still believe there has to be more than pain waiting for you. And honestly, I do not know if I fully understand faith yet. Maybe I never will. But if I am still here after everything that has tried to empty me, then maybe some part of me still believes in tomorrow.

Because the truth is, tomorrow has always come for me, even on the nights I begged for everything to stop. Even when my mind convinced me that I was too tired to continue, morning still found me. I still opened my eyes. I still got out of bed. Maybe slowly. Maybe painfully. But I did it. And nobody really talks about how exhausting it is to survive yourself. To carry your own thoughts every day and still function like nothing inside you is collapsing.

I think people misunderstand healing. They think healing means becoming untouched by what hurt you. But I do not think that is real. I think healing is learning how to carry the pain without letting it carry you. It is understanding that some wounds close while others become part of your skin. There are memories I still revisit accidentally. Certain songs, certain nights, certain conversations that return like ghosts when I least expect them to. And sometimes I hate how deeply I feel everything. But at the same time, maybe that depth is proof that my heart is still alive.

I spent so much time trying to become someone who did not feel so much. Someone stronger. Someone less emotional. Someone who could walk away without replaying every word afterward. But the more life moves forward, the more I realize sensitivity is not weakness. Feeling deeply is not weakness. Caring deeply is not weakness. The world just makes people believe softness cannot survive here. Yet somehow, despite everything, soft people continue surviving every single day.

And maybe that is who I am becoming now. Not someone fearless, but someone honest. Someone who admits that some days I feel powerful and other days I feel completely lost. Someone who still questions life while trying to love it at the same time. Someone learning that growing up is realizing nobody actually has everything figured out. We are all just walking each other home while pretending we know the directions.

There are still nights I wonder who I will become years from now. I wonder if the future version of me will look back at this girl with tenderness or sadness. I wonder if she will finally feel at peace. If she will finally stop overthinking every little thing. If she will finally believe she deserves the life she dreams about. Sometimes I imagine her sitting somewhere quiet, maybe far away from here, smiling at how close I came to giving up without realizing how much life was still waiting for me.

And honestly, I hope she exists.

I hope there is a version of me that no longer carries survival in her chest like a second heartbeat. A version of me that wakes up excited instead of anxious. A version of me that does not confuse love with fear of abandonment. A version of me that finally understands that not everybody who leaves was meant to stay forever.

But until I meet her, all I can do is continue becoming her little by little.

One overwhelming day at a time.

And maybe that is the strangest part about life. Nobody tells you that becoming yourself feels a little like grieving every version of you that could not come with you into the future. There are pieces of me I have already outgrown. Versions of me that stayed too long in places that were hurting them because they believed suffering was the same thing as loyalty. Versions of me that begged to be understood by people who had already decided not to understand me at all.

I do not hate those versions of myself anymore.

I actually hold them gently now.

Because she was trying. Even when she looked lost, she was trying. Even when she stayed too long, loved too hard, forgave too quickly, or cried herself to sleep wondering why she never felt like enough, she was still trying to survive with the heart she had. And maybe healing begins the moment you stop bullying yourself for the ways you learned to cope.

I think about childhood sometimes too. About how innocent dreams used to feel back then. When success was simple. When happiness looked reachable. Somewhere along the way, life introduced fear into everything. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of being left behind while everyone else moves forward. And suddenly you wake up one day realizing adulthood is just people carrying younger versions of themselves into rooms they never prepared for.

That is why I think people become exhausted. Not because life is hard alone, but because most people are silently carrying years of disappointment while still trying to smile through ordinary conversations. We pass each other every day without realizing how much someone might be holding inside themselves.

Sometimes I wish I could tell younger me that none of this would make her weak. That one day she would sit with all these emotions and turn them into words instead of silence. Because silence almost consumed me once. There were so many moments where I swallowed my feelings just to avoid becoming “too much” for other people. But emotions do not disappear when you hide them. They wait. They grow. They echo in the quiet parts of your life until eventually you have no choice but to face them.

And I am facing them now.

Not perfectly. Not gracefully. But honestly.

There are mornings I still wake up with heaviness sitting on my chest before my feet even touch the floor. Days where my thoughts move faster than my heart can process. Days where I question whether I am falling behind in life because I have not figured everything out yet. But then I remember something important: maybe life was never meant to be mastered all at once. Maybe we were always supposed to learn it slowly.

The same way seasons change.

The same way wounds close.

The same way people grow.

Slowly.

And maybe that is why I am still here. Because despite all the confusion, despite the heartbreak, despite the nights where I doubted my own purpose, something inside me still whispers, “keep going.” Even when I cannot hear hope clearly, I hear that. Keep going.

So I do.

Even tired.

Even uncertain.

Even scared.

I keep going.