The Part of Me That Won’t Behave

Day 89 – February 20, 2026

There’s a part of my personality that has always been difficult to domesticate. Not in a sloppy way. I’m not out here flipping tables before breakfast, setting men on fire with a glance, and calling it a wellness routine.

I mean in the more inconvenient way.

I have never been particularly good at pretending things are normal when they are very obviously not. I notice too much for that. Patterns. Pauses. Power games. The little tonal shift people think no one heard. The room within the room. The performance beneath the sentence. The way some people enter a space and immediately start trying to arrange reality in their favor.

I catch that. Always have.

And that part of me has made some people feel seen in a beautiful way and others feel a bit itchy. A bit overexposed. A bit like they should maybe leave the room before I smile and say the thing out loud.

Curious women tend to do that.

Especially the kind who don’t apologize for being intelligent. Especially the kind who don’t just ask questions but ask them with the sort of face that suggests they already know enough to be interesting if you lie.

For most of my life, that part of me was alive and well. Playful. Unruly. Slightly inappropriate in the most elegant sense. The little spark that sees absurdity, notices the hidden machinery of human behavior, and feels an almost sacred duty to keep looking directly at it.

Then trauma happened.

And survival mode, predictably, is not a generous host to that kind of electricity.

When your brain is focused on one main job, stay alive, keep moving, don’t let the whole structure collapse under the weight of what happened, curiosity gets quieter. Humor gets buried. Observation narrows into threat detection. You stop being socially feral in the fun way and start being vigilant in the exhausting way.

Necessary. But tragic.

Because I missed her. The part of me that won’t behave.

The part that notices absurdity and wants to laugh. The part that hears a weird sentence and immediately wants to know what insecurity wrote it. The part that can read a room without announcing it, then sit there looking harmless while everyone else slowly realizes they may have underestimated the wrong woman.

That part has started waking back up. And thank God, because she is fun. Not easy. Not polite. But fun.

She does not believe in playing small just because it makes other people feel less observed. She is not especially interested in behaving exactly the way the world expects women to behave when they’ve survived something awful. She has no plans to become a tasteful ghost. She did not crawl through all of that just to emerge bland.

Absolutely not.

If anything, trauma taught her to value herself more selectively and spend herself more intentionally. So now when she shows up, it feels less like chaos and more like poise. Less like rebellion for its own sake and more like a woman deciding, very calmly, that she has no interest in being easier to digest.

Roger demonstrated his own refusal to behave today by stealing a sock and sprinting across the apartment like a criminal mastermind with excellent cardio and no legal defense strategy whatsoever.We are, clearly, cut from the same cloth.

And maybe that’s part of why it made me laugh so hard. Because it felt familiar. That wild little current of life. That refusal to be neatly managed. That insistence on making the room more interesting than it was five minutes ago.

I’ve missed that energy. And I’m starting to trust it again. Not because it’s safe. Because it’s mine.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And the part of me that won’t behave waking up with perfect timing and extremely bad manners.