The World Feels Bigger Again
Day 64 – January 26, 2026
Today the world felt bigger again.
Not physically. The apartment is still the apartment. The neighborhood is still the neighborhood. Roger is still a deeply unserious creature operating with the confidence of a man who has never once paid rent but absolutely believes he owns the place.
No, I mean mentally.
For a long time my brain has been operating inside a very narrow set of concerns. Safety, healing, legal aftermath, processing what happened, keeping myself functional enough to move through the day without my nervous system turning every mildly weird moment into a five alarm emergency.
Necessary things. Important things. But narrow.
Survival does that. It shrinks the map. Reduces your world down to what is essential. What is urgent. What is safest. It cuts away the extra rooms in your mind and locks the doors, like, “Cute imagination. We’re not doing that right now. We’re trying not to psychologically bleed out in public.”
It’s rude but effective. And deeply unsexy. But today something loosened.
My thoughts wandered further than that. Not into panic. Not into memory. Not into some doom soaked little spiral where my brain tries to ruin a perfectly decent afternoon by revisiting every reason it learned not to trust the world.
No. Further out. Into ideas.
Creative ones. Strange ones. Possibility shaped thoughts. The kind that don’t exist just to solve a problem, but to explore something. To play. To notice. To wonder. The kind of thoughts that don’t show up when your whole interior life is being held hostage by survival mode.
That used to be my natural state.
Curiosity has always been one of the most defining things about me. Maybe the defining thing, honestly. I’ve never been good at moving through life half-awake. I notice too much for that. I ask too many questions. I see patterns. I chase ideas. I pull at threads until something true falls out of the walls and lands in my lap looking annoyed.
That part of me has always been a little dangerous. Not because she destroys things. Because she reveals them. And for a while, that curiosity felt buried.
Not gone. Never gone. But buried under the heavier, less glamorous labor of surviving. Because when something violent happens, your brain does not particularly care that you used to be a fascinating little menace with a mind like a jeweled box full of knives and glitter. It cares that you get home. That you stay safe. That you keep breathing. That you remember the exits.
Fair enough.
But today I felt something shift. My mind wandered because it wanted to. Not because it was looking for danger. Not because it was trying to solve fear. Not because it was rehearsing survival.
Just because it was alive.
And that might sound small, but it is not small. Not to me. Because curiosity is a sign of life expanding again. It means the walls of my mind are not pressed so tightly inward anymore. It means there is room again for wonder, for ideas, for the weird little observations that make life feel less like a threat and more like a puzzle I might actually enjoy touching with my bare hands.
It means I am not only recovering. I am returning.
Roger, naturally, expanded his own curiosity by trying to catch a squirrel and then immediately regretting the decision when he ran headfirst into the fence. The lesson did not stick. His confidence remains unmatched. Honestly? Same.
Because there is something beautiful about a mind getting wider again after it has spent so long in containment. Something sexy about intelligence coming back online. Something almost holy about realizing you can feel the world opening instead of closing.
That’s what today felt like.
Not a breakthrough. A widening.
A little more room. A little more possibility. A little more of me returning to the center of my own life with that familiar look in her eyes. The one that says I’m interested again. Be careful.
Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.
And the world, at last, opening back up wide enough for my mind to go wandering in heels again.
