A Woman With Range
Day 108 – March 11, 2026
One thing I keep realizing lately is that I have range. Which sounds obvious until you remember the world is constantly trying to flatten women into one note creatures for ease of handling. Soft or sharp. Smart or sexy. Funny or serious. Tender or dangerous. Like we’re supposed to pick one lane and stay there so everyone else can feel emotionally organized around us.
How boring. I am not one thing.
I can be soft and hard to fool. I can be warm and impossible to manage. I can be thoughtful, inappropriate, observant, emotional, funny, elegant, and completely willing to ruin a fake vibe with one well-placed sentence.
That is not confusion. That is depth.
And I think what I’ve lived through has made that even more obvious to me. Because after trauma, there’s this weird pressure, spoken or unspoken, to become legible in a more limited way. The brave survivor. The broken one. The healing one. The strong one. The cautionary tale. The inspiration. The woman who makes her pain presentable so everyone else can extract a lesson from it and move on before dinner.
No thank you. I am not becoming easier to summarize. If anything, I am becoming less available for reduction. And that feels good.
Because range is part of what makes me dangerous in the best way. People like predictability. Predictability makes them feel smart. But women with range? Women who can hold tenderness and edge at the same time? Women who can make you laugh and unsettle you in the same paragraph? Women who can be beautiful and devastatingly observant without announcing every weapon in the room?
Those women stay a few steps ahead. As they should. I think about that a lot lately. Not in an ego way. In an accuracy way. The woman I’m becoming is not simpler because of what happened to her. She is not spiritually sanded down. She is not a cleaner narrative. She is not a motivational quote in lipstick.
She is more exact. More layered. More deliberate. More unwilling to betray any part of herself just because the world prefers its women coherent, grateful, and lightly edited for public consumption.
Absolutely not.
Some days I want softness. Some days I want solitude. Some days I want to build something. Some days I want to seduce life back into being beautiful. Some days I want to laugh at humanity like the whole species is a brilliant but unstable improv group with a god complex and poor boundaries.
All of that is me.
And I’m done acting like complexity is a flaw just because other people are intimidated by women who contain more than one weather system.
Roger, naturally, spent part of today behaving like a man with at least six distinct moods before noon, including tenderness, rage, hunger, theatrical betrayal, joy, and what I can only describe as suspicious hallway diplomacy. Again, range. I respect it.
Maybe that’s what I’m honoring in myself too. Not just survival. Not just strength. The full ridiculous, elegant spectrum. The fact that I am still deeply alive in multiple directions at once. That I did not go flat. That I did not become one-dimensional just because life got dark.
That feels important. Because people remember women with range. They do not always know what to do with us. But they remember.
Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.
And a woman with far too much range to ever be mistaken for something simple.
