The Margins of Rock Bottom - Based on My Lived Life Experience

She didn’t mean to make a ceremony out of it. It just happened that way.

The first page tore too easily. The sound surprised her with a soft, almost polite noise. It was nothing like the noise in her chest. She stood in the kitchen with a stack of notebooks she’d been carrying for years, their covers bent, their margins crowded with questions she never finished asking. Scripture, prayers, half-brave hopes. She told herself she was only cleaning. Then the second page went. Then the third. By the time she noticed her hands were shaking, paper was already on the floor.

She had once believed in saving things. Ticket stubs. Old receipts. Notes folded into pockets and forgotten until they went soft. These notebooks were supposed to be different. They had followed her through two apartments and one marriage, then into a house that still felt like someone else’s idea. She had written in them late at night, early in the morning, in the quiet spaces between children’s questions and unanswered emails. She had written when she didn’t know what else to do.

Her second marriage was failing in quiet, expensive ways. The kind that don’t make scenes but leave the kind of dents and bruises you keep finding weeks later. The kind that teach a house how to hold its breath. Some mornings, she woke already tired, as if she’d been bracing all night for something that never quite arrived. Her kids from her first marriage would feel it too. Again. And the thought sat in her throat like a stone she couldn’t swallow.

She looked at the words she had once trusted. None of them had saved her. None of them had fixed anything. They had promised endurance. They had promised meaning. They had promised that if she stayed long enough, tried hard enough, prayed correctly enough, something would eventually stop breaking.

So she kept going. In a frenzy of anger that only continued to grow with every paper that was torn. She didn’t cry. She didn’t pray. She worked. Rip. Tear. Crumple. The trash filled, then the counter, then the thin space beside the fridge where dust always gathered, no matter how often she cleaned. Poems disappeared. Stories followed. Notes she had once underlined twice turned into soft, useless noise. It felt honest. Efficient. Like finally admitting that effort and outcome were not the same thing.

When she was done, the floor looked like winter. Her heart felt on fire, and not in a good way. She stood there longer than she meant to, listening to the refrigerator hum, to the distant sound of a car passing along with the train in the background , to her own breathing finally slow. There was relief in the quiet, the way there sometimes is after a storm has already decided not to come. She told herself this was what starting over looked like. Clean notebooks. Empty hands.

Weeks passed. She had the kind of crippling brain fog you get when you’re surviving instead of living. She made lists. She crossed things off. She forgot to write new ones. She built small plans and called them progress. She found ways to stay busy that didn’t require much thinking. The notebooks stayed buried in the back of her mind, deep in the back with all the other trauma from the past. Until one quiet morning when they didn’t.

The thought came back without permission: You erased yourself. She was standing in the hallway, one sock on, one still in her hand. The light through the window had that late-morning softness that made dust look intentional. She told herself it didn’t matter. She told herself she was being dramatic. She put her sock on and then the urge to look for any remanence overcame her like a wild fire, raging across the prairie. Most of what she found were the predictable remains. A corner of cardboard. A loose spiral. A smear of ink she didn’t remember writing. It felt strange, seeing the pieces without the shape they used to make. Like recognizing a voice you couldn’t place.

Then, in the bottom of her nightstand trash can, she found one. One scrap of paper, caught like it had missed the eviction, but torn like it had been served the notice. The edge was jagged. The ink was faded. At the bottom, a few words had survived the wreckage: I am a chil & I am enou. Not poetry. Not intention. Just what the tear had allowed.

She sat on the floor with it. The house made its ordinary sounds around her, unaware anything had changed. She knew the rest of the sentence by heart. I am a child of God and I am enough. She had written it once on a day that felt braver than this one had felt. She had believed it in a way that left no room for doubt. And it is what survived.

Even in pieces, it refused to stop being true. It didn’t need all its letters to stand. Apparently, neither did she. There was something darkly funny about how after destroying years of theology, the only thing left was a half sentence about who she was. A half sentence that contained her full identity. As if God had watched the whole small apocalypse and said, That's cool. You are still mine though. Rude. Comforting. Effective.

She thought about all the ways she had tried to become smaller. Quieter. Easier to keep. She thought about the careful sentences she used in arguments, the ones that left room for retreat. She thought about how often she had confused surviving with staying. She had been carrying a book idea for years. She never shared the idea because she just knew that it wouldn't work. Every time she thought about how to share the idea it seemed like she had just made it up in the car. The title kept changing, depending on the day and the damage. Lately it was this: One Big Heartbreak or One Huge Testimony—You Can Decide. She used to think it was about choosing the right interpretation. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was about choosing not to erase the record. To find the beauty in heartbreak.

She taped the scrap inside the medicine cabinet door she opened every morning. Not because it was pretty. Because it was honest. Because it stayed. The house did not change overnight. Neither did she. Some days still felt like she was carrying water in a cracked cup trying to fill a bathtub. Some mornings she still woke already tired. But there was something steadier now, something quieter and harder to argue with. Maybe being broken doesn’t erase what’s true. Maybe it just edits it down to what matters. She hadn’t lost her faith that day in the kitchen. She had only lost the idea that it had to look whole to count.

Turns out I am a chil & I am enou was enough to start again. Turns out rock bottom has margins too. And the truth doesn’t need all its letters to survive.