Surviving in stillness, when your body wants to move but your life does not

How do you keep moving forward when everything around you has come to a standstill and your own body keeps reminding you of what once felt free?

Sometimes it feels as if I no longer exist, but only continue to endure.

Not because I want to, but because stillness is the only option when there is no way out.

This is not a report, not a lament, not a plan.

It is a snapshot of how it feels when everything in you wants to move, but there is nowhere to go.

For anyone who also lives with a body that screams for space while the world whispers: “just stay where you are.”

We lie curled up on the bed.

Mart feels more depressed than ever, Fannar licks his paws obsessively, and I… I stare at the window hoping to see something beyond these four walls. But the sky is so gray that I can no longer distinguish it from the concrete building beneath it. Together they form one large, somber wall, as if the world itself wants to tell me that there is nothing left. No opening, no view.

And then there are the stories. The perfect camper stories. They blow through my head like the storm that carried the past days into every corner of the country. Where I thought the roar of leaf blowers or the endless rustling of the wind would be the loudest, it turned out to be my own thoughts. Deafening. Relentless.

Thoughts like these:

– Thanks to Inge we were able to buy the parts. The diesel tank, the timing belt, the necessities. So why are we not a visible step further? And why does it take just one person helping us to feel so enormous? Has she been through something similar? Does she see the urgency of our situation for what it really is, and wants to be able to honestly say she helped when one day we might not survive it anymore?

– Why is it that after all these years we still haven’t taken a step forward? Why have we really been stuck in the same room for more than four years?

– Why are we truly the only ones without anything to sell, without a family to fall back on, without even a single euro saved?

– What would we have to do in such a short time to raise a few thousand euros? I am willing to do anything.

– The people I know all have a driveway. Why doesn’t anyone offer us a place? Am I too loud? Or not loud enough? Do they see another side of me than strangers online do, and does that make it easier to look away?

– One acquaintance (also grieving, also withdrawn) literally lives in her small room because the rest of the house is too painful. She too has hairy children, also feels uprooted like I do. And I would so love to offer her a temporary place on some land. But… which land?

– Why is every available piece of land either too far away or still too crowded? Why can’t there just be silence somewhere?

– Why don’t landlords care who actually comes onto their land? I lay my whole soul bare, but in the end they still give it to the first person who can be physically present. Is that what matters?

– Why do your parents’ finances determine so much about how your life turns out? Because money decides everything in this world, because help is only given to those who are already on the radar.

– Why do people only show understanding for stories they recognize? Why does everyone immediately raise money for a young mother with cancer, but remain silent for people like us? Is it the cancer? The child? While cancer is more often preventable than a brain that works differently, than hypersensitivity, than trauma. A system that structurally excludes your way of being alive.

– Why do I stand in this tiny space every single day just to cook food all day long? For whom? To stay alive? When I never wanted to be a housewife and never wanted to live according to the rules of a world I neither understand nor follow?

And these are only the thoughts I can put into words. The others — about the past, about everything we could have done differently, about how often I fail myself, have failed, keep postponing — I keep those to myself. Every minute. But they are there.

I feel… used up. Worn out. My brain is running overtime, and still nothing meaningful comes out. My body is emptied. Overstimulated in my head, under-stimulated in my limbs. And that last part is what people often forget: that I once loved to move.

At nine years old I did gymnastics. I skated daily. I was always outside. Always in motion, always physical. And even though I never had enough freedom, the real discovery began when I met Mart. Then came the walks. The unknown places. The summers with a car and a tent or even our little home on wheels. That feeling of finally being able to breathe in open air.

Until twelve years ago, my life looked very different. Every week the same shopping center, just for a coffee or to buy something unnecessary – those were my outings, my vacations. Until my seventeenth birthday, “going on holiday” meant either going along with a mother who could barely stand because of her anorexia, or one of her exes (she had sixteen of them) who took over three quarters of the parenting. Their strategy was always the same: threats, punishment, instilling fear, wherever I was.

Only when I met Mart did I feel what moving outside really meant.

And now…

Now I hardly use my body anymore. And I feel that. Like a machine that rusts when it stands still for too long, that is what life in stillness feels like. I was made to move, not to be trapped in bed.

We look at Google Maps together. Not to plan, but to remember. Small adventures from before. Not hikes, not long treks, but just wandering together. To feel what once was. Who we were. What we had. Because I, despite everything, want to keep believing it really happened. That we truly chose each other back then. Even though it now often feels as if we are merely housemates, bound together by survival instead of life.

Maybe it is time to feel that again. Not as an escape, but as an anchor.

Maybe remembering, too, is a form of moving.

✨ This is not a story about giving up. It is a story about the body’s need for movement, about remembering freedom in the midst of stillness, and about holding on to the belief that survival is not the end point but the path toward life. If you read this and recognize even a fragment of yourself in it, know that you are not alone. Remembering can also be a way of moving forward.