The courtroom smells like old varnish and old fear. It’s in the wood—oak benches rubbed smooth by decades of desperate hands—and in the fluorescent hum that settles under your skin like static. At seventy-two, I’ve spent my share of time in rooms where strangers decide your fate: hospital lobbies, mortgage offices, school principal’s chairs when Trevor was nine and suddenly discovered spitballs. But this room—the first time I’ve sat across from my own son while a judge wears the weight of our lives like a robe—this one presses on my lungs.

Judge Henrietta Callaway isn’t the gavel-pounding type. She’s small in the way a diamond is small, compact and impossible, dark eyes going still when she listens. When she leans forward and looks at Trevor, I know she’s measuring something that can’t be written in a transcript.

“Mr. Northwood,” she says, not raising her voice, just cutting the air with it. “I have one question for you.”

Trevor’s suit is the expensive navy that photographs well. He bought it last year for a pharmaceutical sales dinner, the same week Sienna posted pictures of their trip to Turks and Caicos: her in a white sundress held up by hope and very little fabric; him with sunglasses that looked like apologies he never made. His lawyer, Marcus Brennan—young, expensive, hair cut to look like certainty—sits at his elbow like a GPS whispering the next wrong turn.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Trevor says, and his voice is so smooth I could mistake it for the boy’s voice I used to hear when he’d whisper from a top bunk, “Mom, are you awake?”

“If your mother had nothing,” the judge says, pen laid carefully across the file in front of her as if she’s setting down a blade, “no house, no savings, only her Social Security check to survive on, would you be sitting in this courtroom today?”

The hum returns. It takes the whole room in its mouth and doesn’t let go. Trevor opens his mouth and nothing comes out. Brennan leans in to whisper, but you can’t whisper an answer you don’t have. Sienna crosses one leg over the other, diamond bracelet catching the sterile light, and looks at the exit as if it might do something for her it hasn’t done for anyone else.

Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.

“Answer the question, Mr. Northwood,” Judge Callaway says, sharper now.

The strangest thing about a lifetime with a person is that sometimes the silence is the answer. I know how shame sits under Trevor’s jaw. I know the way his eyes drop to the floor when he remembers something he doesn’t want to. If I had nothing—if there were no house to mortgage, no small retirement account, no cushion of my own sacrifice—he wouldn’t be here. That truth is so loud I can hear it over the hum.

Three months ago my kitchen smelled like eggs and coffee and a quiet I’d grown to trust. Trevor’s car doesn’t make a sound in the driveway—Audis don’t—but I felt it anyway, that vibration I’ve carried in the ribs since I became a mother. He doesn’t visit on Tuesdays. It’s a fact like sunrise. I dried my hands on my apron and unlocked the door before he knocked.

“Trevor,” I said, and my voice did that soft thing mothers don’t choose. “This is a surprise.”

He kissed my cheek like you kiss an aunt you don’t quite trust with your secrets. “Got a minute?” The briefcase made a small thud on the kitchen table we bought at a garage sale when he was in fourth grade and I still had to choose between rent and shoes for winter. Behind him, in the doorway, Sienna leaned her shoulder against the frame and didn’t come in. She wore a sweater the color of cream, her hair perfect in that effortless way money buys. She smiled the way people do just before they ask you to do something you won’t want to do.

“You want coffee?” I asked, already reaching for a mug out of habit and muscle memory. He shook his head.

“This won’t take long,” he said, and slid a folder across the table.

“Mom, we bought a house.”

For one bright second something lifted in me. “That’s wonderful,” I said and meant it because I’ve wanted my son to feel rooted in a way that doesn’t require me as soil. “Where?”

“Maplewood Heights. Four bedrooms. Good schools.” He smiled the way people do when they hear applause at the exact moment the band hits a crescendo. “Granite countertops. Backyard for the kids.”

He talked without looking at me, his hands moving like they were trying to sell me a dream. I’ve been sold enough dreams to know the receipts matter.

The papers in the folder made a whisper when I moved them. Mortgage. Two thousand eight hundred dollars due on the first of every month. A number that feels like a chest tightening.

“That’s a lot,” I said carefully.

He shifted. “We stretched on the down payment, but the kids deserve this. You understand.”

I understand stretching. I understand living with a calculator in your skull. I understand making dinner out of a pantry someone else would call empty. I nodded. “What do you need, sweetheart?”

He didn’t say it gently. He didn’t apologize first or make a joke to soften it like he used to when he wanted a candy bar in the grocery store checkout aisle. He tapped the mortgage page with one clean finger.

“We need you to pay it. Two thousand eight hundred a month.”

It landed in the room and lay there, heavy and breathing, like a stranger.

“You’re our family,” he said, and that word did a thing to the back of my eyes. “This is what family does. Your house is paid off. You have Social Security. You don’t need much. You can afford it.”

He looked at me then, finally, and I searched his face for the boy who used to drape himself over my shoulders while I stirred sauce and say, “Smells good, Ma,” like pasta was church. I didn’t see him. I saw a man looking at a ledger.

“Sienna?” I said, and gestured to a chair.

She didn’t sit. She tilted her head and smiled with all her teeth. “We’re family, Clara. These are your grandchildren. This is your legacy. You’re sitting on equity you’re not even using.”

I remember when the word “equity” meant a black-and-white worksheet Trevor brought home in seventh grade and I explained it at the kitchen table with a pencil and patience I could not afford. I felt my hands begin to shake and put them in my lap.

“I can’t do that,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. “I will not pay for a house I didn’t buy.”

“Can’t or won’t?” he asked, and there it was—something sharp and unfamiliar underneath the question. It was the voice he used on the phone to the airline when they lost his luggage. It had never been for me.

“Both,” I said, surprising myself with how steady I sounded. “I raised you. I gave you everything I had. I have ninety thousand in retirement from forty years of tips and wages and cleaning chemicals. I have this house because I skipped vacations and shoes and haircuts. I’m not a bank.”

“You’re choosing money over family,” he said, low.

“No,” I said. “I’m choosing not to be used.”

He grabbed his briefcase. Sienna’s heels made that angry tap on my tile. They reached the door before he turned back.

“Don’t expect to see your grandchildren again,” he said. “You made your choice.”

The door slammed so hard the picture of him in his graduation gown fell, glass cracking like a lightning bolt down the center of the two of us.

Grief makes your house smaller. It moves in and rearranges furniture so you bump into it when you’re not expecting to. Three weeks went by and nobody called me anything but “ma’am” at the grocery store. Felix had a birthday and I wrapped a present out of habit and hope and left it on their porch. The next morning the box sat on my steps with a note in Sienna’s slanted handwriting: We don’t accept gifts from people who abandon family.

On the fourth day, I didn’t cry. I took out the photo albums. I looked at every picture from his first day of school sticky with jam to the day he married a woman in a cathedral where I felt like a ghost. In every picture I was there—my hair worse than I remembered, my clothes cheap and clean, my hands always reaching toward him. I started to remember myself as a person in those photos, not just a shape holding someone else up.

The doorbell was the flat tone of bad news. A man in a gray suit handed me an envelope with my name on it and said the sentence that belongs to another kind of story: “You’ve been served.”

The complaint said things I’ve never seen next to my name: breach of verbal contract, elder financial abuse. It said I promised him money with my words around a turkey and a pie and the softest room in my chest. It said refusing made me an abuser.

Regina Co’s office was on the twelfth floor of a building downtown with elevators that made my ears pop. She took the papers, read them, and her eyebrows did a small jump I trusted.

“This is audacious,” she said, which is a lawyer’s way of saying what my friend Delilah from church said later in the kitchen: “That boy has lost his mind.”

“Can they win?” I asked.

“Not if the world makes any sense,” she said. “But the world sometimes doesn’t. I need to know you never promised.”

“I never promised,” I said, and thought about all the promises I did make: I will show up. I will feed you. I will love you without counting.

“We’ll prove that,” she said. “And we’ll prove they want your money to pay for their choices.”

Discovery is a dull word for what feels like a strip search. We gave them my bank statements, my Social Security deposit, the balance of a retirement account that took a lifetime of aching feet to build. They answered with numbers that made me feel both poor and rich at once: one hundred ninety-five thousand dollars a year between them before taxes and humility; car payments that could feed a small village; a mortgage that pressed against their throats like hands; credit card statements that looked like catalogs.

“He’s not struggling,” Regina said, tapping the list with one perfectly manicured finger. “He’s performing struggle to get your money.”

When she slid their vacation pictures across the desk—Sienna’s white sundress now a petty spectator—I realized how much of my sorrow had been courtesy of Instagram. The theatre of wealth staged for people who barely like you, the applause you didn’t ask for, the envy you didn’t want. If Trevor needed to choose between the theater and me, he’d chosen the stage.

Thanksgiving came and went with a turkey breast for one. Christmas brought lights to my block and quiet to my living room. On New Year’s Eve, I held my phone like a lifeline and didn’t call him because I wanted to be a person who didn’t beg to be loved by people who’d stopped practicing altogether.

Regina is a patient general. “They expect you to fold,” she said over coffee while the city shook off February. “They expect you to settle. They expect you to be a mother first and a person never.”

“I am both,” I said, and the words surprised me enough I said them again.

Trial days come dressed as ordinary days. I stood in front of my closet and chose a navy dress I wore once when Trevor said “I do” to a woman in a cream dress who doesn’t return gifts. I put on my mother’s pearls. I looked in the mirror and said, out loud, “You are allowed to exist.”

The courtroom was colder than the hall. People filled benches the way people always fill spaces where other people bleed: curious, quiet, kind if you look at their mouths. Judge Callaway looked over her glasses at us the way a woman looks at a garden she planted when it needs weeding.

Brennan went first. He smiled like a man who expects a commission. “This is about family obligation,” he said, and I watched the judge watch him try to make greed sound like love. He said I’d promised. He said “generational wealth” like it was a diagnosis and I was a carrier. He said my “comfort” demanded “investment” in granite and present-tense perfection. He sat down satisfied with his script.

Regina doesn’t do theatre. “This is extortion,” she said like she was ordering toast. “This is adult children trying to turn their mother into a bank.” She held up the receipts of their life and read them like a poem nobody wants to hear: Saks. Turks and Caicos. Tesla. Audi. Mortgage. Costco-sized entitlement.

We played the game then. Trevor on the stand, telling a story of a good son who took literally the words “I’ll always be here,” forgetting I meant “for your heart” and not “for your ledger.” He cried at the right places. He said “abandoned” like it belonged next to my name.

Regina stood and stripped the story of its costume. “You make six times what your mother made when she raised you,” she said, and the numbers took off their sunglasses and cut the room open.

Sienna sat and called me selfish. Regina held up a receipt and asked what kind of selfishness smells like Nordstrom when Social Security smells like canned soup.

We rested. The judge rested her glasses on the file like she was putting them to bed. And then she asked the one question you can’t wiggle away from: If I had nothing, would he be here?

He did not answer with words. He answered with silence, and the silence told the story like an old friend who refuses to lie for you.

The judge dismissed the case like she was putting two children in the car after a tantrum. “With prejudice.” She made Trevor and Sienna pay my legal fees. She said the phrase “elder financial abuse” was not for people with granite countertops and Lexus payments.

In the hallway after, Trevor came to me with rage where his apology should have been. “Are you happy now?” he hissed, and I thought of the night he cried at three because he’d dropped his stuffed bear in the dark. “You’ll never see your grandkids again.”

“No,” I said, and I surprised myself with how quiet and how strong I sounded. “I’m heartbroken. And I’m also done. I’ll be here if you ever apologize, not for losing, but for what you did. I will not buy your love. I’m your mother, not your retirement plan.”

He turned away. Sienna said the truest thing she’s ever said—“She’s not worth it”—and they walked into a future built on a foundation the judge had just proved was sand.

People like to fast-forward here. They want the letter to arrive the next day, the apology to look like a movie, the reunion to happen under easy sunlight. That’s not how grief works. Grief is not linear; it is a neighborhood with dead ends and cul-de-sacs and one exit you find only by walking.

The days after the verdict were not golden. The house was still mine, but it echoed in a way it hadn’t before. I joined a book club. Returned to the food bank, where hands older than mine passed me green beans and thank-yous. I took a watercolor class from a woman named Loretta who taught me that light is nothing without shadow. I learned to paint sunsets that looked like forgiveness.

Six months later, there was a letter in Trevor’s messy hand, folded into itself like a man who doesn’t know how to stand up straight yet. He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t ask for an apology for the judge. He said Sienna had left. He said a therapist had asked him when he stopped seeing me as a person and he didn’t have an answer. He said “I am sorry” and it sounded like a man who had finally run out of performances.

Felix drew a picture: a stick Grandma holding hands with two smaller sticks labeled me and Zara. Above it—block letters that wobbled. I miss you.

I called him. I told him the truth. I told him what he’d done and what he’d broken. I told him what he could rebuild if we went slow and careful with our hands and our hearts. We met at a cafe. He was thinner, hair too long, sweater instead of suit. He cried. I cried. We ordered more napkins. I said, “I am not a bank.” He said, “I know.” I said, “You get one chance.” He said, “I will not waste it.” The thing about sons is that they still look like your baby when they put their head in their hands in a public place.

A week later, I met them at the park. Felix ran to me at full speed, the way only seven-year-olds and dogs do. Zara hung back, then came small and fierce. We fed ducks. We pushed swings. We spoke only of school and science and books and the price of cotton candy. Trevor sat on a bench and cried without making a sound loud enough to shame him.

If this were a neat story, that would be the end and you could clap. It is not neat. We go to therapy together. Trevor texts sometimes at midnight when he wants to buy something he cannot afford and instead writes, “I went home. I ate leftovers.” I say, “Good job, kiddo,” because you don’t stop calling him kiddo just because he put on a suit and forgot you were a person for a while.

On my seventy-third birthday, there were two extra chairs at my kitchen table—both of them small and wiggly. We ate cake. Felix asked if I have a “granite counter,” and I laughed until I cried, then I told him the truth about laminate and choices and the way lasagna tastes the same no matter where you slice it.

If there’s one thing no one tells you about aging, it is how you become a student again. Not of calculus or grammar—though I still diagram sentences in my head—but of your own worth. We spent years being taught to say yes. Saying no is a class you give yourself.

After the lawsuit, there were people who stopped talking to me. Some were Sienna’s friends in a mommy group that treated entitlement like a philosophy. A few were women at church who read “honor thy father and mother” and turned it into “honor thy grown child’s temper tantrum.” I am not unchristian. I believe in a God who fed people fish and bread and also flipped tables when they turned a holy space into a market. I brought my own table back into my house and flipped it upright and called it mine.

The classes at the library moved to Zoom for a while when the air decided to hurt us and we learned how to be human from squares. Loretta continued to teach me how to paint light. “The trick,” she said one afternoon when we were both tired, “is not to go after the bright parts. You paint the shadows. The light comes on its own.”

Six months after the park, school called. Well, not school—Trevor called from the school parking lot, voice low. “Felix bit a kid,” he said, and he sounded so much like his father in that moment that I had to sit down. “I don’t know how to do this, Mom.”

“Sit in the car for two minutes,” I said. “Breathe. Then go inside and listen more than you speak. When you get home, ask Felix what happened and then ask him what would have made him feel safe enough to do something else. And start packing an extra snack in his backpack. Angry kids are often hungry kids.”

There was a pause. “Did I ever—” he started.

“Every day from four to ten,” I said, and we both laughed until we could breathe again.

I didn’t mention money and neither did he. The house in Maplewood Heights sold and they moved to a smaller place with a mortgage that didn’t put hands around his throat. He sold the Audi. He took rides in carpool lines. He learned to make turkey meatloaf and how to make rice without burning it. He learned the names of his kids’ friends’ parents. He learned, finally, to see me.

It’s a peculiar thing, being seen by your child. For years you are a set of hands and feet, a calendar and a wallet, a warm shoulder and a cooler head. If you’re lucky, there comes a day when he looks across a coffee table and says, “What do you want, Mom?” and means “today, in the rest of your life.” The first time Trevor asked me that, I didn’t have an answer. So I walked. The second time, I said, “I want to spend Christmas in a cabin with a fireplace. Just me and the kids for one day. No presents that aren’t handmade. Hot chocolate. Cider. Pizza.” He said yes. We ate pizza by a fireplace and it tasted like forgiveness with pepperoni.

Letters came from people after the case. Not to me—we’re not famous like that—but to Regina, because lawyers have email addresses and courage in their return murk. A woman in Ohio whose son asked her to sell her wedding ring to help with a boat he hadn’t finished paying for. A man in Arizona whose daughter sued him for the down payment he wouldn’t give his ex-son-in-law. A grandmother in Kentucky who raised her grandson and lost him to a daughter-in-law’s idea of image. They wanted a formula. They wanted a law that could change hearts. I wrote back when Regina forwarded them to me. I said, “Say no. Say it again. Say it with a therapist. Say it into a phone and hang up. Say it with love. Help with babysitting. Help with soup. Help with job applications. Don’t help with granite.”

I wish I had a number for how many people wrote back and said, “I said no. I didn’t die.” Sometimes we act like boundaries are cliffs. They’re not; they’re fences with gates you can open when people show up with respect.

If you are waiting for Sienna to reappear in this story with a changed heart, you’ll be waiting with me. She did not call. She did not write. She posted pictures with other people’s granite. Felix stopped saying her name when we were together and then he said it again in therapy with Dr. Williams, who somehow knows how to make boys cry and still feel safe. Zara said, “My mommy says we can’t talk about you with Grandma,” and I said, “Then let’s talk about ducks,” and we did. You cannot teach another person’s child new words if their parent won’t let the air in, but you can make room for them when the air is theirs.

Trevor went back to school. He says “night classes” and he wears the look of a man who has eaten humble pie and still found room for knowledge. He will finish a degree he abandoned for money because he knows now that money does not hold you when you are dying. He took a job in a place without a company brochure in glossy paper. He gets home before sunset. He knows the names of his kids’ friends and their allergies. There are days he is angry—at himself, at the world, at me for teaching him to mirror love he did not practice. There are days he is kind. The trick, he says in therapy, is to keep showing up on both kinds of days.

Regina came to dinner once after the verdict and we ate pot roast under the dim light of a lamp I have had since Carter. She brought a pie, pecan, and told me she was moving firms, tired of men like Brennan who confuse confidence with ruthlessness. She said she was opening a practice focusing on elder law and “gray-divorce,” and she said “gray” like it was a color she was repainting the world with. I gave her my mother’s recipe for pie crust, because if you save someone, you deserve more than a thank-you.

Loretta hosted an art show at the community center. Six of my pieces hung on a wall painted the same yellow as the hallways of the elementary school where I spent ten years being called “Miss N.” One was a watercolor of the courthouse steps. One was of a little boy’s sneakers on a linoleum floor from the year I bought new ones even though it meant no meat for a month. One was of sunset over a fence, because that’s what a boundary looks like when you’re on the right side of it, I think. People say kind things. It is a strange feeling to be known for something other than your resilience.

The second Christmas in the cabin, Zara asked why my wedding ring is so thin. “Because I wore it for forty years,” I said, and she nodded like she understood the math of love. Felix asked if Grandpa was in heaven and I said I hoped so and he asked if there were ducks and I said if there aren’t, it isn’t heaven. Trevor watched me over the rim of his mug and we didn’t say out loud the name of the thing that stood outside in the snow and didn’t come in. That is grief. It learns to wait outside.

One morning at the food bank a woman came in with a boy on her hip and a bruise where her laughter used to be. She asked for peanut butter and I handed her two jars and called her “ma’am” and then I followed her to the parking lot and slid the name of a shelter under the peanut butter and said, “No one will ask questions you don’t want to answer,” and she said, “Sometimes people will take everything you have if you let them,” and I said, “Yes. Especially the people you love,” and she nodded and hugged the boy and drove away like a person is allowed to.

Saying no to Trevor did not kill me. It did something like the opposite. It saved me. It saved him, too, though he wouldn’t have agreed for a long time. We talk now about money the way we talk about weather: it exists, it changes, sometimes it is a storm, sometimes it is sun. We do not make our choices in the dark anymore. We break it down on paper like I did with his seventh-grade math homework. Tests, quizzes, homework. Mortgages, groceries, sometimes a pair of sneakers that make a small boy feel like his feet belong in the world. He calls me when he wants to buy something big and I tell him the truth: “If it doesn’t fit in cash, it doesn’t fit,” and he groans and hangs up and later he texts me a picture of his kids reading library books on the couch and I think, maybe that’s wealth.

The letter from the court came two months after the verdict: a photocopy of the judge’s order stamped “paid”—Trevor and Sienna had paid my legal fees from the sale of the house. I wrote the judge a letter I did not mail—people like judges must be stalked at less than the rate we imagine—and I said, “Thank you for choosing dignity as a legal category,” and then I put the letter in a drawer with my pearls and the first Mother’s Day card Trevor ever made me with clay handprints that are somehow still the size of forgiveness.

Sometimes people at church ask me how we did it. “How did you forgive?” they whisper like it’s a test they haven’t studied for. I tell them the truth. I didn’t at first. I set a boundary and I protected it with my lawyer and a judge and the word no and then I took care of myself like I wish I’d taught myself to do decades earlier. After a while—months, not days—Trevor came with a changed heart and I recognized it because it looked like effort, not performance. Forgiveness is easier when the person stops asking you to ignore the wound and starts bringing bandages.

The last time the judge’s voice came back to me was not in the courthouse or in my kitchen. It was in a grocery store aisle standing in front of a shelf of pasta that cost more than it used to. A woman behind me was on the phone, saying the sentence I’ve come to know: “He says if I loved him, I’d help.” I turned without planning to and said, “You can say no and still love him,” and she looked at me like people look at strangers who say the thing they needed to hear out loud. She nodded, turned her cart, and kept walking.

We live in a world that calls boundaries “selfish” when women have them. Let me tell you what selfish is: asking your seventy-two-year-old mother to pay your mortgage so you don’t have to cancel your vacation. We also live in a world that uses “generational wealth” like it’s a promise God made to people who already have granite. Let me tell you what generational wealth is in my house: a story about dignity. A recipe for pie crust. A watercolor of a fence at sunset. A boy who learns the difference between want and need. A girl who learns to hug without handing out conditions. A man who learns to call his mother and ask, “How are you?” and then wait for the answer.

Trevor and I have coffee every other Saturday now. Sometimes he brings the kids, sometimes it’s just us, sometimes he misses because life is a thing that drops balls. He apologized again a few months ago, not because I needed it again, but because he did. He said, “I truly thought comfort meant you owed me,” and I said, “Comfort means I finally had enough after a lifetime of not,” and we laughed and sipped our coffee and looked out the window at a world that still wants to measure love in dollars and we agreed to disagree with it.

On my seventy-fifth birthday, the kids made me a card in crayon. Felix drew a stick figure with pearls and wrote “Grandma is a boundary” because he misheard “a bounty of love,” and I laughed until I cried and then I taped it to my refrigerator because sometimes children say the truth without knowing it: I am a boundary. Not a wall. A fence with a gate. People who knock with respect are welcome. People who climb are not.

If you are reading this because you sat in your kitchen and someone you loved slid papers across your table and called your sacrifice “equity,” hear me. You’re allowed to say no. If you already said yes and hate yourself for it, you are allowed to change your mind. If the people you love call you names for choosing to live when they ask you to die, find a judge inside yourself who will say, “Dismissed with prejudice.” If you are lonely afterwards, join a book club. Plant tomatoes. Paint a fence at sunset. Sit on a bench in a park and watch ducks. Arrange coffee with a friend who does not require you to prove you are worthy to be at a table you bought with your own hands.

The last time Trevor and I were in a courtroom together was for someone else. His friend’s messy divorce needed character letters and babysitting during hearings and a pot of chili when one day was just too long. We sat in the back like people who knew the smell of fear and ink and knew how to breathe through it. When it was over, we walked down the courthouse steps. He reached for my hand and for a moment, he was nine and his father just died and we were both learning to walk again.

“Mom,” he said, “thank you for saying no to me. It saved me.”

“I know,” I said, and we both looked up at a sky you could almost mistake for a watercolor if you knew how to see light by its shadows.

I went home to a house that is still mine. I made tea and put on a sweater and took down a folder from a cabinet where I keep things that remind me who I am. It has the judge’s order stamped PAID. It has Felix’s “Grandma is a boundary” drawing. It has my mother’s pie crust recipe in her handwriting that slants like a woman always moving. It has the first letter Trevor wrote from a new life after the old one burned down. It has a photograph of me and Trevor at a kitchen table in a house without granite that fed us anyway.

I set the folder down and made myself a piece of toast with jam and I ate it at my table with the sunlight doing its quiet work on the linoleum. The truth is quiet. It’s a woman’s hand steadying a cup. It’s a boy’s laugh down a hallway. It’s a judge leaning forward to ask the only question that matters: If love had no money in it, would you still be here?

If your answer is yes, keep showing up. If your answer is no, learn to walk away. Either way, turn your face toward the window. There is a world outside that wants you to live.