Not great, actually.

or, on keeping your head above water when everything hits at once

Life has been feeling heavy lately, and I’ve been trying to sit with that instead of pushing past it.

A dear friend of mine died suddenly a few weeks ago in a tragic accident, while she was with her family on Spring Break. It’s the kind of thing that makes no sense no matter how many times you turn it over. She was vibrant and present and then, just like that, she was gone. I’ve been thinking about her constantly, and about how inadequate that word—gone—is for what actually happens when we lose someone we love.

When grief arrives this way, sudden and without warning, it has a particular quality to it. It doesn’t just make you sad. It makes you acutely aware of how little control any of us actually have. The illusion of safety we construct around ourselves—the calendars, the plans, the routines—all of it revealed, in an instant, as exactly that: an illusion.

I remember, maybe ten years ago, joking with my husband that every time we talked to our parents, we’d get what we started calling “the catalogue”—a running inventory of everyone they knew who was sick, injured, or dying. We found it darkly funny at the time. Then we turned 40 a few years ago, and the joke stopped being funny, because the catalogue became ours.

Now we’re the ones keeping track. Friends receiving diagnoses that change everything. Parents whose needs are quietly, persistently growing. Kids navigating a world that feels less predictable by the year. Last week I was texting with a close friend I hadn’t spoken to in a few months. We were both sharing heavy news, and at some point there was nothing left to say except: this life stage kind of sucks.

The term “sandwich generation” was coined in 1981, which means it has existed for as long as most Millennials have been alive. We grew up hearing it. We just didn’t know what it would feel like to live it.

What do we do with this?

I want to be honest with you: I’m not going to tell you that there’s a way to make this not hard. Grief, exhaustion, and the particular loneliness of being the person everyone else is leaning on are all real. There’s no five-step framework for thriving in this mid-life messiness.

What I can offer is this: some ways of being with the difficulty that I’ve found actually help.

Learn to tolerate ambiguity without collapsing it

One of the most psychologically sophisticated things we can do during a hard season is resist the urge to resolve it prematurely. Grief, uncertainty, the chronic low-grade anxiety of caring for aging parents and/or managing your own health issues while raising young children—these states are uncomfortable precisely because they don’t have clean endings. Our minds are wired to seek resolution. We catastrophize or we minimize, because both of those feel more manageable than sitting in the open middle. But the open middle is where most of life actually happens. The goal isn’t to get through it faster. It’s to develop a tolerance for not knowing how it ends (hard, I know).

Stop performing “fine”

There is a particular exhaustion that comes not from what you’re actually carrying, but from the energy you spend pretending you’re not carrying it. High-achieving people are often exceptionally skilled at compartmentalizing, at showing up, at appearing capable even when they’re hollowed out. And sometimes that’s necessary. But when it becomes the default, it costs you something important: the chance for someone to actually see you. I’m not suggesting radical vulnerability with everyone. I’m suggesting that you find at least one person with whom you don’t have to perform. And then let yourself actually not perform.

Recognize that grief and drive are not opposites

We live in a culture that wants you to either be okay or not be okay, and to move between those states on a reasonable timeline. High-achieving women, in particular, often feel pressure to continue producing—the work, the parenting, the presence—even while carrying something heavy and unresolved. But loss doesn't wait for a convenient moment, and it doesn't prevent you from also being effective, ambitious, or capable. Both things can be true at once. You can be heartbroken and still want things for yourself. You can be exhausted and still be good at your job. Letting those coexist—rather than demanding that one cancel out the other—is its own form of resilience.

Let the smallness of the moment be enough

When life feels this fragile and this large, there is something quietly radical about letting a small thing be sufficient. The coffee that’s actually hot. The conversation with your kid that wasn’t rushed. The text from a friend who checked in. We talk a lot about presence, but usually in aspirational terms—the big moments, the intentional practices. What I mean is something more ordinary: on a hard day, a small good thing is not nothing. It might be exactly enough.

Final thought

None of this erases the weight. My friend is still gone, and the world is still the kind of place where that happens. But I think there is something important in naming the life stage honestly, without euphemism—not as something to “optimize”, but as something to move through, imperfectly, together.

If your life has been feeling heavy too, I see you.

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