Life, Rudely, Continues

Day 28 – December 21, 2025

There is something almost offensive about how life keeps going.

Not in a dramatic end of the world way. I mean in the deeply ordinary way. The kind where the coffee still needs made. The dog still needs fed. The laundry still exists like some smug domestic villain waiting in the corner. The sun still rises with absolutely no concern for whether or not you are emotionally available for another day of being a person. Rude. Seriously.

That’s what today felt like.

Not terrible. Not good. Just offensively normal.

And I think that’s one of the stranger parts of living through trauma, or grief, or any version of your life getting split clean in half. The world does not pause out of respect. There is no dramatic hush. No invisible committee steps in and says, “You know what, maybe she’s been through enough. Let’s hold off on requiring socks, emails, and emotional regulation for a while.”

Nope. Life just keeps walking into the room like it pays rent.

I noticed that hard today.

The fact that I am somehow expected to continue existing in a reality that no longer feels shaped the way it used to. That my body is still here, my apartment is still here, Roger is still here being Roger, and yet something in me is still trying to catch up to all the ways my world changed.

That feeling is so weirdly lonely. Because from the outside, I’m just having a day. I made coffee. I folded clothes. I stood in the kitchen staring into the out the window like my brain was searching for Wi-Fi.

Normal enough I guess.

But internally? Internally I’m still learning how to live in a life that does not feel arranged the same way anymore. I’m still learning how to be inside my own body without feeling like I’m borrowing it in places. I’m still learning how to participate in ordinary life when ordinary life occasionally feels like a bad improv scene I got shoved into without rehearsal.

And I know I’m not the only one who’s felt that.

I think a lot of people move through hard things and quietly develop this double existence. Outwardly functional. Internally halfway underwater. Smiling at the cashier while their nervous system is doing advanced calculus with fear, memory, grief, and whether they’ve answered enough texts lately to seem okay.

We are so committed to pretending. I’ve been internally on fire and yet I’ll still say things like, “I’m just tired.” Really? No babe, you are psychologically reenacting the collapse of an empire in your ribcage, but sure. Tired.

Today had some of that in it. That weird split. The world asking for normal. My body offering “best I can do is haunted but polite.”

Still, there were small things that got through to me. The warmth of coffee in my hands. Roger’s I’m hungry again face. The winter light doing that pale quiet thing it does when the day never fully wakes up. The fact that even in all of this something in me is still paying attention. Still noticing maybe. Still collecting meaning out of scraps and silence.

That matters. That’s a win for sure. Because maybe that’s what survival looks like some days. Not strength in the cinematic sense. Not bravery with dramatic lighting. Just the quiet audacity of continuing to notice beauty while life has the nerve to keep going.

Tonight I’m left with one truth more than anything else…

Life, rudely, continues. And somehow, so do I.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me still standing in the middle of both like I was always going to.