Never lose your fighting spirit.

Fighting spirit gets pictured as defiance: the jaw set, the speech from the film. Inside a long hard stretch it looks like nothing of the kind.

It looks like putting the bins out on the right night. Shaving. Answering one email.

That maintenance is the fight. Not because small tasks are secretly heroic, but because they're the thread keeping a person tied to an ordinary life while the rest of it is unrecognisable.

Nobody loses this all at once, either. It goes quietly, and it comes back the same way, one dull task at a time.