I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, But I’m Still Here

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, But I’m Still Here

I’m trying to build a new life, and the truth is—I still don’t really know what I’m doing.

Some days I can almost feel momentum. Other days my anxiety takes over and turns everything into something heavy, tangled, and far more complicated than it needs to be. Simple things feel hard. Ordinary decisions feel loaded. Hope itself can feel exhausting, like something I have to justify instead of something I’m allowed to have.

I don’t do much socially, not because I don’t want connection, but because here, connection has a very narrow definition. Drinking. Coffee. Eating. Shopping. That’s the bulk of it. That’s the rhythm of most people’s lives here. There aren’t many new experiences, new spaces, or new energy. Trying to “get out and try something new” feels hollow when there’s rarely anything actually new to try.

Pocatello is a small town, and I feel that smallness in my body. I’ve never felt more anxious or boxed in than I do here. I’ve always felt safer in larger cities—places where you can disappear into a crowd, where no one knows your history unless you choose to tell it. In big cities, I don’t feel watched. I don’t feel defined by my past. I don’t feel like my life has already been decided. I can breathe there. Here, everything feels closer, tighter, louder in the wrong ways.

On top of all of this, because of my health concerns and ongoing health issues, I’ve started the Social Security disability process. That wasn’t an easy decision, and it wasn’t a dramatic one—it was a necessary one. Anyone who’s been through it knows it’s slow. It takes months. It doesn’t solve anything right now. It’s simply something I had to do because my body and mind demanded honesty.

What I want in the meantime is not a handout. I don’t want pity. I don’t want to be rescued. I want a job.

I want work I can actually do, that will actually hire me, and that pays enough to let me move forward into the next phase of my life. I keep applying. I keep waiting. And nothing happens. The longer this goes on, the more stuck I feel. I can’t help but think the closure of my previous company—and all the drama surrounding it—has followed me in ways I can’t see but absolutely feel. Like I’m carrying a shadow I didn’t choose, and no one wants to look past it.

What makes it even more disheartening is how upside-down the economics feel here. You can go from Pocatello to Boise and suddenly the pay is almost double—sometimes one and a half times higher—for the same kind of work. Yet the cost of living isn’t wildly different. Milk costs the same. Groceries cost the same. Gas is comparable. Even rent, when I actually look, often isn’t that different at all. I keep finding places in Boise that cost about what rent costs here.

So I don’t understand why wages in Pocatello stay so low. It feels like being told to survive on less for no real reason. Over time, that does something to you. It wears you down. It makes you feel invisible, undervalued, and trapped.

But at the end of the day, the economics almost don’t matter.

What matters is this: I want a job. I want money. I want a way out. I want to start my life over.

And I’m doing this for me—because I’m the only person I have left anymore.

I’m the one I come home to.

I’m the one I wake up with.

I’m the one I eat with.

I’m the one I have to take care of, worry about, and keep alive.

I would like that to change.

I want community again. I want possibility. I want a city that feels alive, where I don’t feel boxed in by history, smallness, or silence. I want to live somewhere I love—or at least somewhere that lets me get lost long enough to become myself again.

Starting over in a new city isn’t running away for me. It’s choosing survival. It’s choosing growth. It’s choosing to believe that my life isn’t over just because this chapter feels stalled, lonely, and uncertain.

This isn’t a success story. Not yet.

This isn’t a tidy ending.

It’s just the truth of where I am—still building a new life without a map, still waiting for the door to open, still knocking anyway.

And for now, that has to be enough.