You Are Not Alone

No matter how strong you are, there are moments when you feel alone in what you’re carrying. But what I’m learning — and what I wish someone had told me sooner — is that you are almost never as alone as your mind makes you feel.

The moment you find even one person who truly understands, something shifts. What once felt isolating starts to feel human.

Most days, I don’t dwell on what I’ve been through. I work, I train, I fundraise, I build a full life. If I don’t sit in the brain tumor, the surgeries, the hearing loss, the facial paralysis, I don’t get swallowed by it. That’s how I cope. Still, every now and then, it catches up to me.

Sometimes I look at old photos and can’t believe how easily I used to smile or how naturally I used to laugh. I never thought twice about the mechanics of my own face. Scrolling back feels both comforting and confronting. It’s strange to miss a previous version of yourself while still fully being yourself — Nicky 2.0.

And sometimes I notice how freely most people get to just live. They laugh without calculating it, hear clearly across a table, move through conversations without effort. They don’t think about the small adjustments that have quietly become part of my everyday life.

That awareness doesn’t consume me, but it humbles me. It reminds me that the things we take for granted are often the things we only notice once they change.

There are moments when the reflective questions surface: why the brain tumor, why the multiple surgeries, why the hearing loss, why the facial paralysis — and ultimately, why me.

If I linger there too long, it’s dangerous and can start to feel isolating, like this very specific combination of circumstances was handed to me alone. But it wasn’t.

Isolation thrives in silence, and community has a way of dissolving it.

In the past six months alone, I’ve spoken to at least nine people preparing for upcoming brain surgery — people scared for their lives, sitting in the uncertainty that comes before something life-altering.

One woman had never even been admitted to a hospital before and suddenly found herself facing a brain aneurysm. Her world shifted overnight.

In those conversations, something becomes clear: none of us are alone in this. The details may differ and the timelines may vary, but the fear, the questions, and the vulnerability are shared.

Recently, I’ve also started intentionally seeking out and following more women living with facial paralysis — women who openly share their vulnerability and make something that once felt isolating feel normal. Women who are deaf. Women who have endured multiple brain surgeries. Women navigating bodies that don’t function the way they once did.

Women like McKinnon Galloway (@mckinnongalloway), who shows up boldly and beautifully in her reality. Seeing her reminds me that strength doesn’t disappear when your body changes. It evolves.

There is something deeply calming about being around people who don’t need a long explanation. They normalize what you’re going through. They simply understand and that steadies you.

But community isn’t only made up of people who share the exact same experience. It’s also the allies who choose to stand beside you — the friends, family members, and quiet supporters who may never fully know what it feels like but show up anyway.

The ones who listen, who check in, who sit with you in uncertainty, and who carry pieces of the weight with you. Those people matter just as much.

Sometimes the most important step is simply letting someone in — trusting that you don’t have to hold everything on your own.

As I was writing this, I took a break and opened Instagram, where a fellow AN and facial paralysis friend had posted in response to someone asking whether she had undergone the exact same facial paralysis procedures that I have — the exact same ones and it stopped me.

What feels hyper-specific — the nerve grafts, the surgeries, the adaptation — is not mine alone. That realization matters.

Purpose helps too, not because it erases what happened, but because it keeps my identity bigger than my diagnosis. Training, fundraising, building community — finding purpose elsewhere reminds me that I am more than the hardest thing that has happened to me. I refuse to let it define me.

But community is what ultimately reminds you that you were never alone in the first place.

Whatever you are going through — anything that makes you quietly ask why me, anything that feels unfair or uniquely heavy — there is someone else in this world navigating something strikingly similar at this very moment. Maybe you haven’t found them yet but they exist.

And when you turn toward community instead of inward toward isolation, something shifts. Your experience becomes normalized. Your fear becomes shared. Your story becomes part of something larger than yourself.

You are not defined by what happened to you. And you were never meant to carry it alone — not without community, and not without the people who choose to stand beside you.