There’s something uncomfortable people rarely admit about tragedy:

Public sympathy has an expiration date.

At first, when something catastrophic happens, support arrives quickly. Messages. Calls. Concern. Meals. Check-ins. People asking if you’re okay every five minutes.

And many of them genuinely mean it.

But eventually life resumes for everyone except the person whose life exploded.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for.

Grief is socially acceptable for a little while. Trauma is understandable for a little while. People are patient while the wound is fresh.

But eventually the world quietly expects progress.

Not healing.
Progress.

The problem is that real recovery does not move in a straight line. It’s repetitive, ugly, exhausting, and deeply inconvenient to witness long term.

People know how to respond to funerals.
They do not know how to respond to Year Three.

Especially when you’re no longer visibly falling apart.

Once you become functional again, society tends to assume you are healed.

You go grocery shopping.
You smile occasionally.
You make jokes again.
You appear outwardly operational.

So people conclude:
“Good. They’re better now.”

Meanwhile internally you’re still trying to figure out how your entire life became unrecognizable.

I don’t even think most people are intentionally abandoning you.

I think human beings are simply built to move toward stability and away from prolonged emotional uncertainty. Eventually they return to their own routines while you’re still standing in the wreckage trying to understand what survived.

And honestly?
That’s probably normal.

Pain isolates people partly because prolonged suffering makes observers uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say anymore. They worry they’ll say the wrong thing. Eventually silence becomes easier.

Over time you stop blaming people for moving on.

You begin realizing they were supporting the emergency version of you, not necessarily the permanent altered version that remained afterward.

That realization hurts.
But it’s clarifying.

It teaches you the difference between:

• people who witnessed your tragedy
  and
• people willing to walk beside your recovery

Those are not always the same people.

In the wasteland, eventually the rescue parties stop coming.

At some point you stop waiting for them and simply learn how to carry your own supplies.▌