One Hundred Days of Not Disappearing

Day 100 – March 3, 2026

Today is the hundredth entry in this journal. And that feels a little unreal. Because when I started this, I was not thinking about “a hundred entries.” I was not thinking about structure or legacy or readership or branding or what any of this might become on a website with my name and my voice and my nerve all over it. I was thinking about survival. About truth. About what to do with a life that had been split open so violently I could barely hear myself think inside it.

I started writing because I needed somewhere to put the truth.

That’s it.

Not a polished truth. Not a clever one. Not a truth sanded down for public consumption. The real one. The ugly one. The frightened one. The furious one. The one that sat in my body like broken glass and needed somewhere to go before it cut me open from the inside out.

And the truth was heavy.

Fear. Anger. Confusion. Shame that did not belong to me but still tried to move in. The legal process. The reporting. The strange humiliation of having your life turned into evidence. The even stranger humiliation of continuing to make coffee and answer texts and walk your dog while carrying something that enormous inside your nervous system.

So I wrote. A lot.

Some days I wrote because I needed to hear myself clearly. Some days I wrote because the page felt safer than my own mind. Some days I wrote because if I didn’t put language around what was happening, the chaos started redecorating.

And then, because I am apparently insane in exactly the right way, I started publishing them too.

That part still gets me.

Because it’s one thing to survive in private. It’s another thing entirely to write in real time while surviving. To shape the days as they are happening. To publish them on my site. To say, here. This is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. This is how trauma moves, how memory moves, how healing moves, how a woman moves when she is still becoming herself after life tried to drag her backward by the ankles.

That took nerve. A lot of it.

And what I didn’t know then. What I could not have known, is that this journal would become more than a place to hold pain. It became a record of becoming. That may be the most important thing I’ve made in a long time.

Because entry by entry, I can actually see it. The early days when everything felt raw, disorienting, unbearable, too close. The wintering period where my world got quieter and something inside me was doing invisible work I could not yet explain. The middle stretch where fear stopped being the only voice in the room. The moments curiosity came back. Humor came back. Instinct came back. Boundaries sharpened. Clarity deepened. The woman beneath the damage started becoming visible again.

That woman surprises me sometimes.

Not because she’s perfect. Because she’s interesting.

A hundred days ago, I did not know what this would become. I did not know I would keep going long enough to make a hundred entries. I did not know I would still be here, still writing, still publishing, still thinking, still noticing, still seducing truth into language, still making something beautiful and strange and alive out of a year that gave me every reason to go dim.

But I am.

And I need to say that plainly. I did not disappear. That matters.

Because when trauma hits, disappearing can feel seductive. Not physically, necessarily. But emotionally. Spiritually. Quietly fading out of your own life because the weight is too much and the body is tired and the mind is terrified and shrinking feels easier than staying awake inside it all.

I know that feeling. And still, I didn’t disappear.

I walked into a police station and told the truth when my voice wanted to shake. I sat with memories that tried to swallow me whole. I kept learning how to breathe inside a nervous system that had been living on high alert for far too long. I rebuilt the quiet rhythms of daily life. Coffee in the morning, walks with Roger, noticing the sky again, learning how to let a calm day be calm without interrogating it like a suspect.

I kept writing. I kept publishing. I kept showing up.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

And the strangest part of all may be this, I think I like this version of me more than the one who existed before everything happened. Not because I’m glad any of this happened. Absolutely not. Let’s not get poetic about brutality. But because this version of me knows things now.

She knows how strong she had to become. She knows what it feels like to stand in the middle of chaos and keep her balance anyway. She knows what it costs to tell the truth and how beautiful it is when you do it anyway. She knows the difference between being open and being available for harm.

She knows how to hold grace in one hand and curiosity in the other and move forward with something that feels an awful lot like freedom. She knows how to write from the wound without becoming only the wound.

That matters to me.

A hundred entries ago, this was a place to hold pain. Now it feels like something else entirely.

A record. A witness. A body of truth. A map of survival. A public/private archive of what it looks like when a woman refuses to go numb, refuses to go quiet, refuses to let the worst thing that happened to her become the most interesting thing about her.

And yes, Roger has been here for nearly all of it.

Curled beside me. Interrupting scenes. Demanding snacks. Barking at existential threats like leaves, shadows, cardboard boxes, and occasionally reality itself. Loyal in the way only a dog can be. Emotionally available, deeply unserious, and almost certainly convinced this whole project has been a long form literary tribute to his daily life.

He may not be wrong.

So here we are.

One hundred days of truth. One hundred days of writing. One hundred days of publishing it. One hundred days of refusing disappearance. One hundred days of learning that life can knock you flat, alter your nervous system, insult your faith in humanity, and still fail to extinguish your curiosity, your wit, your softness, your edge, your beauty, and your voice.

One hundred days of me.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me still here, still writing, still publishing, still curious, still standing, and somehow more myself than ever.