Erosion: On slipping away

She cannot remember the last time she laughed like that.

The kind of laughter that starts somewhere you can’t control and takes over before you can stop it. The kind that reminds you of when you were a kid and no matter how much trouble you might be risking, every thought and word just makes it become more uncontrollable. The kind that makes you snort, and tears stream down your face, and your muscles ache for days afterward as a reminder that for one unguarded moment, you were completely free. Not managing anything. Not juggling anything. Not holding the shape of a life together so everyone inside it could be comfortable.

Just free.

She tries to remember when she last felt that and comes up empty. Not because it was taken from her in a moment she could pinpoint. But because decades passed in the ordinary way, full of necessary things, and somewhere inside all that necessity, without announcement, without a single day she could identify as the one where it changed, that version of her slipped away.

This isn’t catastrophe or rupture or the kind of loss that arrives with a timestamp and a before and an after you can definitively identify.

Crisis. Grief. Endings. You know when you’re inside them. You know when they begin to ease. However painful that is, it is at least tangible.

Erosion has no such moment.

It happens across decades of prioritising. Of organising. Of carrying the lives of others so seamlessly that the cost becomes invisible, even to the woman doing it. It happens in the ten thousand small moments of putting herself second, or third, or nowhere on the list at all. Not out of weakness but out of love, duty, and the deeply held belief that this was what was required of her. It happens when silence becomes easier than speaking. When the version of herself that people expect becomes the version she stops questioning.

We don’t notice while it’s happening. There is no alarm. No morning we wake understanding that something is gone. We simply continue. We manage the days. We show up for everything that needs us. And functioning, for a long time, feels like enough.

Until something small breaks through.

A song from thirty years ago conjures flashes of a self so distant that it seems more like someone from a film or a dream. A conversation with someone we haven’t seen in years, and they say you were always so — and what they describe is something we can barely reach anymore, and we feel the distance between who they knew and who we woke up as today.

These moments can feel eerie. Like catching a glimpse of someone familiar and realising, a beat too late, that it was us.

We don’t have language for this. We don’t often go to someone and say: I think I have been slipping away. We don’t have the certainty that what we’re describing is real enough to take up space with. It doesn’t present as brokenness. It presents as a vague sense of being less vivid to ourselves than we once were. Of reaching for something that keeps receding just slightly faster than we can move toward it.

This is why preservation matters.

Not as a cure, or as recovery. But as evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we were more than what the years left visible, that beneath it all, there was a woman with a laugh she couldn’t control, with people and passions she loved fiercely, with a self that belonged only to her.

What goes unrecorded disappears twice. First when it fades. And then again, more finally, when there is nothing left to acknowledge it. No trace. No evidence that the version before the long, slow erosion ever existed.

An archive cannot recover what is gone. But it can leave something behind that says: I was here. This was what I loved before I forgot I loved it. This is who I was before the decades of necessary things.

You don’t need a clear story to begin. You don’t need to understand what happened or when. You have fragments. A feeling that keeps returning. Something you keep almost saying and then don’t.

That is enough. A fragment is still evidence.

If this feels closer to true than you expected, I want you to begin leaving traces.

New essays are published here in The Journal twice a month.

If you’re looking for a more structured place to begin, The Vulnerable Work of Remembering is a free guide made for exactly this kind of return to yourself.