For the following five years, I lived in a kind of self-imposed exile, slowly teaching myself how to survive on almost nothing at all. I stretched every grocery budget until it nearly snapped, watched countless plumbing tutorials online rather than call anyone for help, and gradually mastered the delicate art of polite social deception. Whenever friends from church asked how I was “adjusting” to everything, I’d smile and nod along, quietly hiding the fact that I was skipping meals just to keep my own lights on through the winter.
My children checked in on me constantly, their voices always carrying that particular tightness of unspoken suspicion, but I could never quite bring myself to let them actually see how badly I was struggling underneath the surface. I was a proud woman still, determined to survive on whatever scraps of dignity I had left, even as the walls of my own small house seemed to press slowly, steadily inward around me with each passing year.
