It starts the way most things do not end, quietly, almost unnoticed. Then suddenly it is everywhere inside you. That is how We Are All Trying Here feels. I think the reason it stayed with me is because it arrived at the same time life started feeling heavier in small, ordinary ways. Not the dramatic kind of heavy. Just the slow kind. The kind that settles into your shoulders while you are answering students, checking papers, smiling through conversations, commuting home already exhausted before the week even properly begins.
There is a phrase that keeps coming back from the series, “a globs of feeling,” and at first it sounds strange, almost incorrect. But the longer you sit with it, the more accurate it becomes. Because there are moments in life when emotions do not separate themselves into clear categories. Love does not sit alone. Sadness does not arrive clean. Hope does not stay pure. Everything comes together at once, mixed and heavy, like something that cannot be unpacked no matter how long you stare at it.
What stayed with me most were the characters and how painfully human they felt. They were not struggling in dramatic ways, just carrying ordinary emotional weight that slowly exhausted them. They made mistakes that felt familiar, stayed silent when they should speak, and kept moving even when they were clearly tired inside. Some were chasing dreams that no longer felt possible, while others simply wanted to be understood but did not know how to ask for it. That is what made them feel real to me. They were messy, imperfect people still trying anyway.
Lately, my life has felt like fluorescent lights, unfinished tasks, coffee gone cold on my desk, and staring at the ceiling long after everyone else is asleep. I became a teacher because that is what I studied for. That was the direction. The goal. And now that I am finally here, actually living it, I realized no one really tells you how easy it is to lose yourself inside routines that were once your dream. Some days I feel like I am constantly giving pieces of myself away without noticing. A little patience here. A little energy there. A softened voice for students who are struggling. Encouragement even on days when I cannot encourage myself. And somehow, by the time I get home, there is barely enough left of me to sit quietly with my own emotions.
Maybe that is why the series affected me the way it did. It reminded me of the strange loneliness that exists even when you are surrounded by people all day. A classroom full of voices, co-teachers walking past you in hallways, group chats constantly active, notifications always arriving, and yet there are still moments where you feel emotionally untranslated. Like there are entire paragraphs inside you that nobody has really read yet. I think adults become experts at disguising this. We learn how to function before we learn how to heal. We learn how to respond with “I’m okay” before we even stop long enough to ask ourselves if it is true. Sometimes I wonder how many people around me are carrying invisible grief while discussing deadlines and lesson plans like everything is normal.
There are people I thought would stay in my life longer. People I imagined would witness more versions of me than they did. Some left loudly. Some left so quietly I did not realize it until much later. And then there are people who appeared unexpectedly, people who became comfort in temporary places, people who probably do not even realize they helped me survive certain weeks just by being kind at the right moment. That is something I keep learning lately. Healing does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it looks like someone remembering your coffee order. Someone asking if you got home safely. A co-teacher laughing with you in the middle of an exhausting day. A student handing you a letter they probably thought was small but you end up rereading at night when life feels particularly unbearable. I used to think healing meant becoming fully okay. Now I think maybe it is just finding people who make being hurt feel less lonely.
And emotions matter more than people admit. I think we spend too much time treating feelings like inconveniences that need to be hidden until they become easier to carry. But emotions are not interruptions. They are proof that something inside us is alive enough to react, alive enough to care. Even sadness. Even longing. Even the terrible ache of feeling left out while everyone else seems connected so effortlessly. There are nights when I genuinely wonder if there will ever be someone who understands me in the exact way I want to be understood. Someone who does not just hear my words but recognizes the emotion beneath them. Someone who notices when I am becoming quieter than usual. Someone who stays long enough to learn the complicated language of my heart instead of leaving halfway through the translation.
For now, I think I am learning that people heal each other in fragments. Not all at once. Not perfectly. Just enough to continue. A conversation after a hard day. A shared silence that somehow feels safe instead of awkward. Someone sitting beside your exhaustion without trying to fix it immediately. Maybe being human has always been this quiet exchange of carrying pieces for one another whenever life becomes too heavy to hold alone. My life is not perfect. Not at home. Not at work. There are absences I still feel. There are wounds that still reopen unexpectedly. But there are also memories now. Small ones. My students laughing too loudly during discussions. The way classrooms feel different after dismissal, suddenly quiet like they are holding onto the day too. Co-teachers sharing stories between deadlines. The strange intimacy of surviving the same exhausting school year together.
And maybe that is what remains after people leave. Not permanence, but pieces. A phrase someone said once. A hallway memory. A seat that stays empty after someone transfers or resigns. The feeling of being understood for five minutes on a random Tuesday afternoon. Tiny fragments of people we carry forward without realizing they already became part of who we are.
The series is not even finished yet, and honestly, neither am I. Maybe that is why this whole thing feels less like a review and more like me accidentally leaving my thoughts somewhere public. Because somewhere between the story and my own life, something blurred together. And even if my words sometimes fall apart at the end like this, even if they don’t always know how to finish themselves properly, maybe that is still part of it. A globs of feeling does not always end cleanly. It just exists, lingers, and slowly becomes memory.
I do not know why I posted this. Maybe I just needed somewhere for all these feelings to go.
