It Wasn't a Never. It Was a Season

They call it the sandwich generation for a reason. You're squeezed on both sides — kids who still need you, even grown ones, and parents who suddenly need you in a completely different way than they used to.

Nobody warns you what happens when it's not just one hard year. It's five in a row.

Here's what that actually looked like, laid out plainly:

Four summers. Four completely different kinds of devastating. I didn't get a single full year in there to just be a person living her life. Every time I thought I'd found solid ground again, the next one was already coming.

It wasn't until January 2025 that things actually started turning. I started HRT, and it helped significantly — not with the scale, it didn't move that at all, but with actually feeling like myself again. I wouldn't call what I'd been feeling depression. That's not the right word for it. It was more that I didn't feel like me, and I couldn't explain why, because on paper I was doing everything right.

Then in June 2025, I found peptides. And that's really where the second half of this story starts.

I think what nobody tells you about years like that is you don't get to fully process any one piece of it, because there's always another piece already on its way. You don't get to just sit with your dad's diagnosis and figure out how to carry it, because your mom is about to end up in the hospital. You don't get to fully recover from sepsis, because life doesn't pause and wait for you to catch up. You just keep moving, because that's what those years required of me.

My dad's diagnosis, for what it's worth, never turned into the heavy thing you'd expect. We stayed positive. We still laugh about things related to it, four years later. It's been a genuinely good four years despite a diagnosis that could have gone a very different way emotionally for our family. He's struggling more now, but I hold onto those years hard.

I'm not writing this because I have some tidy lesson at the end of it. I'm writing it because if you're in your own version of this right now — stretched between people who need you, running on less than you have to give — I want you to know that surviving the years is enough. You don't have to have processed all of it yet. You don't have to be okay yet.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I remember thinking I would never see the light of day again. Never feel normal. Never stop being the person everything kept happening to. I said that to myself more than once, in more than one of those years.

I was wrong about the light of day too. Never say never, even about the years that feel like they'll never end. You just have to keep going, the way I did, one impossible year after another, until one day you find the thing that finally turns it around.

xo

~Jess

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