16. The Courage of Remaining

 We often speak about courage as though it must involve movement.

Leaving.

Fighting.

Climbing.

Overcoming.

We admire the person who runs toward the fire.

The person who crosses the ocean.

The person who stands before a crowd and speaks.

These acts deserve admiration.

But there is another kind of courage that receives far less attention.

The courage of remaining.

It is quieter.

It does not always look like progress.

Sometimes it looks like sitting very still and allowing the day to pass without demanding that you become someone new.

Sometimes it means returning to the same difficult conversation with yourself.

Sometimes it means admitting,

"I am tired."

And refusing to turn that exhaustion into a reason to hate yourself.

We are taught that life should be measured by movement.

How far have you come?

What have you achieved?

What are you doing next?

There is an endless pressure to become.

More successful.

More healed.

More certain.

More resilient.

But there are days when becoming feels impossible.

Days when the greatest thing you can do is simply remain present in your own life.

I think we underestimate how much courage that can require.

Remaining does not always feel noble.

Sometimes it feels repetitive.

You wake up carrying the same questions.

You meet the same memories.

You confront the same fears.

Nothing about the day announces itself as a victory.

And yet...

You are still here.

Not as a dramatic declaration.

Not as a performance.

Simply as a fact.

There is something powerful about that.

For a long time, I thought I had to prove my strength by overcoming everything that hurt me.

I wanted to reach a point where the past could no longer touch me.

Where fear would become a story I told from a safe distance.

Where I could look back and say,

"I am completely different now."

Life has been more complicated than that.

I am not always different.

Sometimes I am simply still learning.

Sometimes I return to old places inside myself.

Sometimes I have to remind myself of things I thought I had already understood.

I used to see this as failure.

Now I am beginning to see it as being human.

We do not learn a lesson once and carry it perfectly forever.

We forget.

We struggle.

We begin again.

Perhaps beginning again is not evidence that we have failed to grow.

Perhaps it is evidence that we are still willing to try.

There is courage in that.

The world may never know what it took for you to reach today.

It may not understand why answering a message felt difficult.

Why leaving the house required preparation.

Why a quiet morning felt like an accomplishment.

The world may look at your life and see an ordinary day.

You may know it was anything but ordinary.

That knowledge belongs to you.

You do not need an audience to validate the effort it took to remain.

I think we should stop asking people to prove that they are strong.

Strength does not always look impressive.

Sometimes it looks like choosing not to give up on yourself after another difficult day.

Sometimes it looks like accepting help.

Sometimes it looks like admitting you cannot carry everything alone.

Sometimes it is simply allowing tomorrow to remain undecided.

That last one matters to me.

Because the future does not always need to look beautiful before we are willing to meet it.

Sometimes it only needs to remain possible.

A single unopened door.

A blank page.

A conversation that has not happened yet.

A morning we have not seen.

Possibility can be very small.

It does not need to announce itself as hope.

Sometimes it is just enough uncertainty to say,

"You do not know yet."

And perhaps not knowing is reason enough to stay curious.

I no longer believe courage is always about moving forward.

Sometimes courage is remaining long enough to discover that forward is not the only direction life can take.

Sometimes we move sideways.

Sometimes we rest.

Sometimes we return.

Sometimes we simply breathe and allow ourselves to be exactly where we are.

That is not nothing.

It is a life.

And if you are reading this while feeling exhausted by the effort of continuing, I hope you are gentle with yourself.

You do not have to turn today into a triumph.

You do not have to prove anything.

You do not have to be inspirational.

You are allowed to be tired.

You are allowed to be unfinished.

You are allowed to remain.

And perhaps, one day, you will look back and understand something that no one could have explained to you at the time:

You were not doing nothing.

You were carrying yourself through a moment you did not yet know how to survive.

That, too, is courage.

— Jean T. Hatoum

Author of I Wrote So I Would Not Fade and J’ai Écrit Pour Ne Pas M’effacer

Thank you for giving my silence a place to land.

If these words felt like home, the rest of the map is in the book.

And if you are able to, supporting my journey helps me afford the medication that keeps my own fractured ember burning.

http://linktr.ee/Jean.Hatoum

I’m not finished surviving out loud. 🕊️



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