(7 min. read)
There’s a kind of tiredness that no nap can fix.
It’s the tiredness that comes from carrying the weight of survival, day after day, wondering if you’ll ever feel truly alive again.
If you’re navigating solo parenting after heartbreak or loss, you may feel caught between two impossible tensions:
You want to hope, but you don’t have the energy to reach for it.
You want to move forward, but the future feels too foggy to aim at.
When everything inside you says, “Why bother?” it can feel almost impossible to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The answer isn’t in chasing after huge dreams or fixing everything at once.
It’s in shrinking your focus to what is small, reachable, and real today.
Shrinking your focus to one small joy a day can reawaken hope without overwhelming your heart.
When life has stripped you down to survival mode, the idea of planning or dreaming can feel cruel. Grand goals feel exhausting, not inspiring. That’s why hope has to start closer. Smaller. Gentler.
Elizabeth Cole, a solo parent, found a simple way to reconnect with life again: “Every morning, I ask myself: what are three things I can look forward to today?”
Not career milestones. Not life-changing decisions. Tiny, tangible things:
- A warm cup of coffee
- Hearing her son’s laugh
- Stepping outside and feeling the sun
When you’re overwhelmed, reaching for a five-year plan paralyzes you. But reaching for five minutes of peace is possible. And small moments of peace, stacked over time, build the foundation of a future worth living into.
It’s not settling.
It’s learning to trust that hope grows best in soil that is nourished daily, not demanded violently.
If the only thing you can look forward to today is ten minutes with a favorite song, that is not nothing.
That is your soul beginning to believe it is safe to hope again.
Reconnecting with your core identity rebuilds your inner strength even when your outer world feels uncertain.
Trauma has a way of stripping away the parts of you that used to feel stable. When everything familiar falls apart, you might start to wonder: who even am I now?
Amber Fuller, a licensed counselor, encourages clients to return to something deeper than their circumstances by answering five small prompts:
- I am…
- I am not…
- I value…
- I don’t like…
- I want…
Writing these down isn’t just an exercise. It’s a way of reclaiming your own story from the wreckage of survival.
You are still kind.
Still funny.
Still someone who values beauty, honesty, creativity.
You have not disappeared just because your dreams were interrupted.
If writing feels hard at first, that’s okay. Start by noticing the simplest truths.
“I am tired, but I am still standing.”
“I value laughter, even when days feel heavy.”
“I want peace, even if I don’t know what it looks like yet.”
These truths are like breadcrumbs leading you back to yourself.
Following them slowly brings you out of the fog and into the life that is still waiting for you.
Finding hope again after loss isn’t about forcing your heart to believe things it’s not ready to believe. It’s about giving yourself permission to find beauty where you are.
Some days, that beauty might look like:
- Sitting in silence and breathing
- Letting yourself cry without rushing to fix it
- Smiling at a stranger at the grocery store
- Making a grilled cheese sandwich and actually tasting it
Small things aren’t small at all when you’re rebuilding a life.They are everything.
Every time you show up for one small piece of beauty, you are moving forward. You are reminding your heart that there is something worth hoping for, even if you can’t see it clearly yet.
You don’t have to map out the future today.
You don’t have to figure it all out.
You just have to stay open to the possibility that even now, goodness is still finding its way to you. One small step at a time.
Hope doesn’t always arrive in fireworks.
Sometimes, it arrives quietly—
In the scent of coffee.
In the sound of your child’s laughter.
In the moment you realize, somehow, you’re still standing.
And standing is more than enough for today.
