The Energy Returns

Day 68 – January 30, 2026

Today I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time.

Energy.

Not frantic energy. Not stress energy. Not the jittery, haunted kind that trauma sometimes mistakes for motivation because apparently my nervous system has a sick sense of humor.

No. I mean real energy.

The kind that shows up when your mind starts engaging with life again instead of just defending against it.

I noticed it while I was making coffee.

Ideas started popping up in my head. Creative thoughts. Strange little observations about life. Tiny sparks of curiosity that made me want to sit down and write instead of just think about how tired I am or what my body is doing or whether my mind has any new dramatic concerns to file under “urgent.”

That got my attention.

Because for months now, my brain has been busy healing. And healing is expensive. Trauma processing takes an almost offensive amount of mental bandwidth. It eats attention. It eats language. It eats the spaciousness your mind used to use for play, invention, mischief, and possibility.

It turns your brilliant brain into a very overqualified emergency manager.

Which, to be fair, was necessary.

But today I could feel something shifting.

The part of me that builds things — ideas, projects, plans, possibilities, whole little worlds out of observation and nerve and whatever dangerous glitter is apparently living in my frontal lobe — is waking back up.

And that part of my personality has always been a little dangerous in the best way.

Because once my curiosity gets moving, it tends to lead.

Not politely.
Not linearly.
Certainly not with a detailed itinerary and a sensible cardigan.

Curiosity drags me into interesting places. Sometimes beautiful places. Sometimes chaotic places. Usually both. It asks one question, then five more, and before I know it I’m standing in the middle of some new mental landscape thinking, well, this is either brilliance or a terrible idea.

Often both.

That’s how I know this matters.

Because the return of energy is not just about feeling less tired. It’s about feeling interested again. Interested in ideas. In life. In what I might make next. In where my own mind might go when it isn’t spending all day trying to protect me from ghosts wearing ordinary faces.

That’s huge.

It means survival is no longer the only thing getting top billing in my inner life.

It means creation is trying to return.

And creation, in me, is never tidy.

It is witty.
It is chaotic.
It is sharp-eyed and slightly inappropriate at times.
It is the part of me that sees a thread in the world and can’t help but pull until something unexpected, beautiful, or unsettling comes loose.

I’ve missed her.

Roger attempted to assist with my creative process by sitting directly on my notebook like a small beige editor with boundary issues and no respect for deadline culture.

A bold editorial choice.

He looked very pleased with himself.

And honestly, I kind of loved the absurdity of that moment. Me trying to follow the first little flickers of energy I’ve felt in a while, and this dog just plopping down in the middle of it like, “Yes, hello, I too would like to contribute to the work.”

Team effort.

But underneath the silliness, something real was happening.

My mind felt lit from within again.

Not fully. Not wildly. I’m not about to pretend I’m suddenly some unstoppable creative cyclone with perfect habits and an optimized sleep schedule. Let’s stay grounded in reality.

But there was movement.

There was appetite.
There was spark.
There was that old familiar sensation of my brain reaching outward instead of inward, wanting to play instead of just protect.

That feels like life returning in a language I know intimately.

And maybe that’s what energy really is after trauma.

Not speed.

Not productivity.

Not forcing yourself into momentum because the world worships output and gets nervous around slow recoveries.

Maybe energy is simply the return of desire.

The desire to notice.
To make.
To think.
To laugh.
To be fully, dangerously, deliciously alive inside your own mind again.

If that’s true, then today mattered.

A lot.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And energy returning to the room like it never stopped knowing where I lived.