You are not just managing a life. You are living one.

I’ve been considering the word “inhabitable” for longer than is reasonable or necessary…

It had its conception in the name of my blog, as this felt more close to the truth than anything else regarding the tides of my inner world… But the more that I sit with this word (because that’s just the sort of thing I do), the more I come to realize that it is far more than just a word or even a name. It is a whole philosophy. A practice. A question I keep asking myself on the ordinary days that make up most of a life, the ones without dramatic movement or neat narratives or anything else worth posting about… These are the quiet, unremarkable, fully human days when the following question matters most and gets asked the least:

“Am I actually inhabiting this life of mine? Or am I just getting through it?…”

And we all do know the difference between those two, I think. We are all familiar with the wonderful experience of remaining fully present within our bodies and our thoughts while being alive in an expanded, fully-expressed way. And then we all know what it means to simply survive the hours, check the boxes, manage the schedule and keep everyone fed and functional while somewhere underneath it all the truest version of ourselves sits in a quiet room, waiting for us to come back and visit her…

I’ve spent a long, long time in that second mode. I am still in it more than I would like to admit. But I am learning slowly and imperfectly (in public) to become someone I did not originally plan to be, and what it actually means to inhabit the life I have… Not the life I imagined, but this real one that I own.

You cannot inhabit the life you planned on having… That life does not exist. You can grieve it (and I passionately believe in grieving it, honestly and without rushing the process), but you cannot live inside it. It is not available for habitation. The only life available for inhabiting is the one you are already in.

And I know how that sounds to the autism and special needs mom who is reading this in a therapy waiting room or a hospital lobby or the parking lot of a school that has called her for the third time this week about her child’s behavior… I know how it sounds to the woman who is somewhere in the raw, disorienting early days after a diagnosis both confirmed her worst fears and rearranged everything she thought she knew about her child and her future and herself. I know how uncomfortably it lands when you are in the middle of a season that is asking everything of you and you are not entirely sure if you have anything more to give.

Inhabit this?.. The first instinct is to laugh. Or cry. Often both.

But I mean something specific by inhabiting. I don’t mean enjoying every moment, arriving at some state of curated contentment where the hard things stop being hard, or assuming the toxic positivity version of your life where you are instructed to be grateful for what you have and then left to figure out how to do exactly that while simultaneously surviving the day…

I thankfully mean something more quietly attainable than that, more interior, more honest:

To inhabit your life means to consciously be engaged inside of it… It is to deliberately be aware of the gift within the current moment that you are assuming without having your thoughts orbit along tomorrow’s duties and yesterday’s doubts as you passively occupy space until bedtime. It’s the difference between “experiencing” your life and simply “managing” it reactively as it comes at you.

We women are very good at managing things. Most of us who are raising children with significant needs have become exceedingly competent managers of our own lives in the eyes of society: the schedules, the systems, the contingency plans for the contingency plans, the colossal cognitive load of keeping everything running… We manage these things beautifully, even. We just sometimes forget to also live the thing we are managing.

Inhabiting is the living part. And it looks different for every woman.

For me, this has looked like sitting on the floor among my two children while we all interact with each other instead of clinically observing them while standing in the doorway, leaving my cell phone in a dedicated spot in a different room (with the ringer still audible) because I value being mentally present where I am located physically, writing this Journal entry at an open bedroom window before the day officially starts instead of scrolling frivolous content before the rest of the household wakes up.

These are simple things. Embarrassingly small things, some of them. But the accumulation of small presences such as these is what inhabiting is made of at its root. It isn’t grand. It isn’t even a personal transformation you complete once and then maintain. It is a practice you are welcome to return to, again and again, every time you notice that you have drifted into managing your life instead of living it.

The Doorway Back In

Again, inhabiting is not a state you achieve. It is a doorway you keep finding, and keep walking through, as many times as necessary. And this doorway can look differently depending on the day and the person navigating it. Somedays it might be a deliberate practice: five minutes of sitting quietly before the house wakes up, a grounding exercise, a journal page, a slow walk around the block that has nothing to do with steps counted. Other times it might look like an even smaller moment than that: taking a single stabilizing breath, breaking from your work just to look at your child’s face, stopping yourself from rehearsing tomorrow’s conversations to actully taste your coffee before you come back to the present moment without any drama or self-criticism. The return is the actual practice here. It’s NOT the sustained uninterrupted presence, which is a fantasy. And coming back is just the repeated, ordinary return to the life that is actually happening for you, in the body you are actually living in, on the specific unremarkable day that is actually yours.

There is something almost radical about that in our society that is always pointing somewhere else on the outside. Towards the next milestone, the healed future self, the season when things will finally be easier… Inhabiting instead says: here. Now. This. The season you are in, with everything it is, including: the hard parts, the unresolved parts and even the parts that are still being transmuted into something you currently don’t have the language for.

This is your life. And it is available to be lived and not just managed right now.

And one of the things that inhabiting your life requires (and I want to name this directly because I think it is the part that takes the longest and matters the most) is having a self to come home to…

NOT a finished self and definitely not the self you were before the diagnosis or the self you will be when this season passes. Just the self that is here now, still becoming, still finding her way, still worth knowing. That self is the one who does the actual inhabiting. She is the one who comes back, again and again, to the doorway. She is the one worth the tending…

She is the reason why my publication exists. Little Alchemies was built around this type of sacred work. Not the external management of a caregiving life, because there are plenty of resources for that (and most of them are genuinely useful). But the interior work. The slow, honest, often uncomfortable work of staying a person with an inner life inside an un-chosen role that can quietly consume every available corner of you if you let it.

If you have lost track of her, if she has gone quiet somewhere among the diagnosis paperwork and the Survival Mode and the years of giving everything to everyone else, she is not gone. She is still in there, waiting in the way that True things wait. Patient. Persistent. A little dusty maybe. But present.

If this resonated, f something here named something you have been living, I’d love to know. The reply button is always open, and I read everything.

And if you are not yet a subscriber to the Little Alchemies newsletter, the door is open. Come in, sit down, and stay awhile.

With warmth,

Cheniece Patrick ♡

Little Alchemies is more than just another lifestyle blog or newsletter about parenting special needs and neurodivergent children; it’s a mom’s real life personal journal and a sanctuary for other mothers and women inhabiting their lives again after Survival Mode. Through honest essays, gentle prompts, and an intentional community, you’ll rediscover your creativity, identity, and inner calm.

TRANSMUTE the weight of living into gold.

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