When Everything Becomes a Fight

There was a stretch where I was at war with a phone number.

It was the regional center — the agency that decides how much support my kids get. And I was fighting them over hours. Here’s the math that had me losing my mind: they’d allotted me roughly what they’d give a two-parent household. And I kept trying to explain the obvious — I’m one parent. One. Doing the work of two. If anything, I need more than the family with two sets of hands, not the same. It seemed so clear to me that it felt almost insulting to have to say it out loud.

I spent hours on it. Phone calls, emails, building my case, rehearsing arguments in the shower, lying awake constructing the perfect thing to say. I was right. That’s the part that kept me locked in — I was completely, defensibly right.

And somewhere in there, without noticing it happen, I had become the center of the universe.

I don’t mean that as a character flaw. I mean it as a description of what was actually going on in my head. My situation was the most important thing in existence. My fight was the realest thing happening anywhere. The whole cosmos had narrowed down to one battle over one allocation of hours, and I was at the dead center of it, and everything — everything — revolved around getting it to come out right. I was protecting my family, for without the “fair” number of hours, we might not make it. This was the intensity of my conviction.

That’s what survival mode does. It shrinks the entire universe down to the size of your crisis.

Here’s what broke it open, and it came at the strangest possible time.

I was learning about astronomy. The real scale of it. And a few facts landed in me with a force I wasn’t expecting.

The universe is something like 13.8 billion years old. Take a second with that number, because the mind can’t actually hold it — 13.8 billion years of things unfolding, one after another, in an unbroken chain, every single link exactly as it had to be, for you to be sitting wherever you’re sitting right now reading this.

And the elements in your body — the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood — were forged in the cores of stars that lived and died before our sun existed. When those stars exploded, they scattered the material that eventually became planets, and oceans, and trees, and you. You are, quite literally, made of stardust. So is your child. So is the person at the regional center who told me no.

We are walking around on a small wet rock, spinning a thousand miles an hour, hurtling through a galaxy so large that light from its far edge takes a hundred thousand years to cross it — and we have absolutely no control over almost any of it. The rock spins whether we approve or not. The sun comes up without our help.

And I’m down here, certain that the most important thing in the universe — my family’s survival — came down to my hours.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a wrong way to hear this.

The wrong way is: so your problems don’t matter, just let it go. That’s not it. That’s not it at all.

What actually happened was subtler and more useful. When I backed up far enough to see the whole picture — the billions of years, the exploding stars, the spinning rock — my fight didn’t become meaningless. It became right-sized. I stopped being the center of the universe and went back to being one stardust creature among billions, all of us doing our best, all of us made of the same exploded stars.

And from that vantage, I could finally see the people I’d been at war with. They weren’t villains. They weren’t out to hurt my kids. They were human beings following a handbook somebody wrote, applying rules they didn’t invent, doing their jobs. It was never personal. It had never once been personal. I’d built an entire enemy out of a policy.

There’s an old way of breaking down the word fear: False Evidence Appearing Real. The catastrophe I was bracing against, the war I thought I was in — most of it was evidence my own mind had manufactured and then believed. The threat felt completely real. And most of it wasn’t there.

Now — I’m not telling you to stop fighting for your child. Please hear that clearly.

Some fights are exactly right. Sometimes you are the only voice your child has, and you should be the squeakiest wheel in the building. There’s a yin and a yang to this — a time to push and a time to release, a time to be relentless and a time to let something go. The whole skill, the real wisdom, is learning to tell which is which.

Like the serenity prayer……God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

What I’m pointing at isn’t the fighting. It’s the state underneath it. The state where everything is a fight. Where every email is a threat, every appointment is a battle, every day runs at a thousand miles an hour and your body never once gets to stand down. The me against the world mentality. That state has a cost, and it’s not a poetic cost — it’s a physical one. A body held in survival mode, flooded with stress chemistry that never clears, starts to break down. The unease becomes dis-ease. And dis-ease, held long enough, has a way of becoming disease.

You were not built to live at a thousand miles an hour. Nobody was. The stars don’t strain to shine.

Here’s how my fight actually ended, and it’s the part I didn’t see coming.

I stepped back. Not out of the advocacy — out of the war. And it turned out fine. Better than fine. With the dust settled, I ended up with more time with my kids, not less. The relationship got closer. And I discovered something that the panicked version of me could never have believed: I could actually handle it. The thing I’d been terrified of turned out to be a doorway.

When I was the center of the universe, white-knuckling every hour, I genuinely couldn’t have handled it — because I was using all my strength to fight false evidence. The moment I put that down, I had strength left over for the only thing that ever actually mattered. Which was them.

The sky was never a distraction from my real life. The sky was the thing that gave me my real life back.

I’ll see you next week.

If this landed, follow along — I write every Monday, for the parent carrying more than anyone sees.

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