The Curve Isn’t the Problem

Life doesn’t unfold the way we think it will. If it did, we’d all be much calmer people.

We’d know when things were meant to happen. We’d move neatly from one phase to the next. We’d have warning before the hard days arrived — and a clear timeline for when they’d leave again. But life isn’t particularly interested in our plans. It has a habit of arriving sideways.

One day you feel like you’re finally getting somewhere. The next, you’re not sure how you ended up right back where you started. Some weeks feel expansive and full. Others feel quieter, heavier, harder to explain. Not because anything is wrong — but because life doesn’t move in straight lines.

It overlaps. It loops. It pauses. It speeds up when you weren’t ready and slows down when you are.

And somehow, all of it is still part of the same story.

The strange thing is how close the highs and lows sit to each other. You can wake up feeling hopeful, energised, even abundant and still end the day heavy. You can be doing “well” by every visible metric and feel oddly flat underneath it.

That isn’t failure.

That isn’t regression.

That’s being alive.

We live in a world now where it’s easy to mistake visibility for truth. Where people can look endlessly fulfilled online while privately navigating things they haven’t worked out how to carry yet. Some people choose to share those moments. Some don’t. And while there’s nothing wrong with either, there is a quiet risk in turning emotion into something performative — when being seen replaces being supported.

Because the loneliest days aren’t always the obvious ones. Often, they’re the days that look the best from the outside.

Life asks us, again and again, to detach from the stories we build about others. To meet people where they actually are, not where we imagine them to be based on fragments and highlights. To treat the person in front of us — not the version we’ve constructed from a feed, a caption, or a carefully chosen silence.

None of us move through life in a clean arc. We all bend. We all pause. We all take turns we didn’t plan for.

What we can choose is how we respond to the curve. How we keep showing up — softer when we need to be, steadier when we can. How we allow room for contradictions. How we stop expecting ourselves, or anyone else, to be the same every day.

Life isn’t asking for certainty. It’s asking for presence.

And maybe that’s the quiet truth underneath everything: the curve isn’t something to fix or rush through. It’s the part where most of life actually happens.

Especially now — in a world where emotional masking has never been easier. Social media allows us to curate versions of ourselves that look composed, high-functioning, even joyful, sometimes while we’re quietly grieving something we don’t yet have language for.

Truthfully, you don’t know what curve someone is navigating.

And half the time, neither do they.

Life isn’t about maintaining a permanent state of calm. It’s about learning how to respond when calm disappears. It’s about self-compassion on the days you feel behind. Boundaries on the days you feel overstimulated. And honesty — real, quiet honesty — on the days you don’t have the energy to explain yourself.

You don’t need to heal loudly.

You don’t need to be consistent to be okay.

You don’t need to justify why something that “shouldn’t” hurt… does.

Life will keep bending. That part is non-negotiable.

What is negotiable is how gently you meet yourself in the turn — and how generously you meet others there too.

If this series has circled anything, it’s this: showing up isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. Again and again. Even when the road doesn’t look how you expected it to.

Especially then.

Words by Eimear Everard