It’s been three months since I returned home, and I still feel like I’m walking around in a life that technically belongs to me, but also feels like someone rearranged all the furniture while I was gone.

Everyone assumed I’d slide right back into “normal” — as if a year spent in Salt Lake, living inside the surreal world of chemo floors, hospital rhythms, and quiet isolation, could be followed by a quick tidy-up and a smooth transition back to everyday life. But it turns out re-entry is not a switch you flip. It’s more like jet lag for the soul.

The first weeks home were disorienting, like waking up from a dream that wasn’t a dream.

I tried to work again, pretending I could just pick everything back up as if I hadn’t spent the past year in a completely different universe. I tried to be a wife again, sharing space with Brandon after Grace had been my only roommate for twelve months — two humans in survival mode, orbiting each other with an intimacy only crisis can create. And then I walked back into a fully occupied home with people who had missed us, who wanted to catch up, who wanted to “make up for lost time.”

But here’s the thing.

I just spent an entire year in quiet, in near-solitude, in the still, narrow world of protecting Grace’s fragile immune system. My days were filled with whispered conversations, hospital beeps, and long afternoons where the loudest sound was my own breathing. I became comfortable with silence, with depth, with truth. I grew in ways I didn’t anticipate — ways I still can’t fully articulate.

And then suddenly… people.

People who want to talk.
People who want to visit.
People who want to ask — constantly — “How’s Grace doing?”
People who mean well yet pull me back into a version of myself I can no longer squeeze into.

Small talk is suddenly unbearable. Not because I dislike people — I love deeply. But because I changed. I cracked open. I grew roots in places I didn’t know had soil. I lived a whole inner lifetime while the outer world kept spinning.

Now even conversational niceties feel like sandpaper.

“How’s Grace?”
“Are you glad to be home?”
“You must be so relieved everything is back to normal!”

I want to answer honestly:
Nothing is normal.
And I am not the person I was.

But socially, we don’t do that. We smile. We nod. We say “She’s doing really well” and “It’s so good to be home,” and inside, something tightens because we’re barely scratching the surface of what actually happened.

These past three months have been a slow, uneven transition into a new reality — trying to remember how to be social after a year of isolation, trying to understand who I am now, trying to fit back into a life I outgrew while no one was watching.

I am adjusting.
Kind of.
Some days better than others.

I’ve unpacked my suitcases, but I haven’t unpacked everything inside me. I’m still getting used to the sound of my own house, the rhythm of my marriage, the presence of friends and family swirling around my once-quiet world. I’m still trying to remember how to be a person in a room full of people again — without the shorthand of survival, without the depth of crisis, without the emotional x-ray vision I developed in Salt Lake.

And underneath it all, there is a quieter story forming — one I’m only beginning to understand.

Somewhere in the middle of chemo appointments and long nights and heart-shaking fear, I found a different version of myself. A version I actually like. A version who doesn’t have the patience for pretending. A version who thrives in truth and presence and real conversations — not the surface-level gloss we’re all trained to perform.

I’m home.
Three months home.
And only now am I beginning to actually land.

The next post will be about that landing — the deeper, internal homecoming I didn’t expect. But for now, I’m here, trying to make sense of this new normal, trying to re-learn how to live in a world that feels both familiar and foreign.

And gently, slowly, I’m finding my way back to myself.