I do a good job of not being depressed, but let’s be clear—it’s work. Daily, intentional, teeth-gritting work. I followed the script American society handed me, even when the pages were stained and missing chapters. I became a teenage mother and didn’t earn my GED until I was twenty-seven. I went to college while raising three children in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, navigating survival like it was a second major. I graduated with honors in 2006, because excellence has always lived in my bones, even when opportunity did not.

Then the Great Recession kicked the door in and pulled the rug out from under everything I had built. From 2008 to 2014, work was scarce, stability was a rumor, and resilience became my full-time, unpaid job. I clawed my way back into the workforce and managed to stay employed—until my body betrayed me with an epilepsy diagnosis. Just like that, the ground shifted again.

Now I’m fifty-five. Black. Female. Disabled. In a system that worships youth, speed, and disposability, that combination gets labeled “washed up,” as if a human life were a used appliance left on the curb. As if wisdom doesn’t count. As if survival isn’t a skill. As if endurance isn’t expertise.

I try not to live in the land of could have and would have. That road is paved with madness and lined with ghosts. Dwelling there would hollow me out. Still, the thoughts creep in—quiet, persistent, tapping on the glass late at night. They ask unfair questions. They measure my life by metrics never designed for people like me to win.

What keeps me standing is the inconvenient truth: I am still here. I raised three children who all graduated from college. I educated myself against the odds. I kept going when the economy collapsed, when my health faltered, when the world decided I was no longer profitable. I learned to bend without breaking. I learned that success isn’t linear, and dignity isn’t granted by employers or systems—it’s self-issued.

Some days the grief is loud. Other days, the pride hums underneath everything. I carry both. That’s not weakness; that’s realism. I am not a failure of the American dream. I am evidence of its limits—and of a woman’s refusal to disappear quietly.

This life may not look the way the brochure promised, but it is mine. And it is still unfinished.