I have a friend.

We have known each other for many years. She is a hardworking woman. Together with her family, she has spent years building everything she has. She has earned every achievement she can be proud of, and I am genuinely happy for her.

Yet there is one difference between us that I don't think she will ever fully understand.

She believes we lived in the same country.

But we didn't.

There were years when her question was how to take one more step forward. Ours was how to stay on our feet. While she was building and growing, we were slowly consuming everything we had managed to build before. Not because we worked less. Not because we knew less. We were simply playing on a different field.

There are professions that a system rewards. And there are others it never officially bans, but gradually pushes to the margins. Building strategic partnerships, crisis management, independent thinking, and creating innovative solutions were not considered valuable for a very long time. If anything, they were seen as inconvenient. Independent people rarely fit comfortably into systems that seek to control everything.

Many of us left the country. Most of us were not chasing adventure. We left because, at home, we were running out of air. We exhausted our savings. We worked, started over, and worked again. And along the way, more and more of us ended up in the same storage pit I wrote about recently.

Some climbed out.

Some never did.

Many are no longer with us.

Others are still alive, but no longer have the strength to begin again.

For them, the pit did not become a temporary refuge. It became the end of the story.

By the time change finally arrived, many of us were standing on the edge of complete financial and personal collapse. We were not handed new opportunities. At first, we were given only the chance to breathe again.

My friend finds this difficult to understand.

When she says that a person should always be able to stay on their feet, she is not wrong.

She simply does not realize that there are times when the ground is not beneath everyone's feet in the same way.

She has hurt me with those words more than once.

Not intentionally.

She simply does not know what it is like when you are no longer working to grow, but merely trying not to lose another piece of the life you once had.

And you know what?

I hope she never truly understands.

Because to understand it, she would first have to walk the same road.

And that is something I would never wish upon a friend.