Some Days I Ask Too Much

Day 102 – March 5, 2026

Some days I think the real problem is that I understand too much and not enough at the exact same time. Which is a deeply annoying sometimes.

I understand enough about trauma now to know why my body does what it does. Why certain sounds land wrong. Why a perfectly ordinary day can suddenly feel emotionally overpriced. Why my nervous system occasionally acts like it’s being run by a small frightened genius with a knife and no union protections.

I understand enough about people to know that most of them are improvising, some of them are kind, some of them are careless, and a select few are so disturbingly hollow you almost have to admire the commitment to being spiritually underfurnished.

I understand enough about myself to know that I am not built for denial. I’m just not. I notice too much. I think too much. I connect too many dots. I can’t really float prettily through life pretending things make sense when they very obviously have raccoons in the walls.

And yet.

Even with all that understanding, there are still things I cannot fully solve.

Why one memory stays and another fades. Why certain griefs arrive dressed like irritation. Why the body keeps receipts the mind would rather shred. Why some people get softer after pain and others become walking personality disorders with good lighting.

That’s what today felt like.

Not confusion exactly. More like intellectual whiplash. One of those days where my brain kept circling life like, I see what you’re doing, while my emotions sat in the corner looking glamorous and refusing to provide clean supporting documentation.

Very helpful.

I think that’s part of what makes healing so weird for people like me. I am a person who wants to understand. I don’t just want to feel the thing. I want to dissect it, translate it, cross examine it, hold it up to the light, flirt with it a little, and then write a closing argument with excellent sentence structure.

That impulse has saved me. It has also exhausted me.

Because not everything yields to explanation. Some things can be witnessed, carried, metabolized, and even survived but not fully solved. And that’s pretty rude if we’re bring honest. I would prefer reality to be more cooperative with my desire to make meaning out of everything with sharp edges and a good pen.

But maybe that’s the lesson I’m circling lately.

That understanding is not the same thing as control. That naming something does not always neutralize it. That insight is powerful, but it is not a sedative. That sometimes the mind can know exactly what happened and still not know what to do with the emotional weather that follows it around three exits later.

Today had some of that in it. Not dramatic. Just human.

I made coffee. I thought too much. I watched Roger conduct himself like a philosopher with no credentials and unlimited certainty. At one point he stared at a completely ordinary corner of the room like it had betrayed him personally, and honestly, that felt relatable enough to be offensive.

There is something comforting in his simplicity.

He wants what he wants. He dislikes what he dislikes. He investigates first and rationalizes never. Meanwhile I’m over here trying to reverse engineer the moral and emotional architecture of every internal flinch like that’s a reasonable way to spend a Thursday.

Maybe it is. Maybe it’s just mine.

Because the truth is, I do need to understand. Not everything. Not perfectly. But enough. Enough to keep the story from eating me alive. Enough to know that what I feel has shape. Enough to know I am not just some loose collection of reactions in cute clothes. Enough to trust that my mind’s compulsive need to examine, interpret, and explain is not a flaw so much as one of the ways I refuse disappearance.

That matters.

And maybe there is something quietly powerful in being a woman who understands too much and still chooses to stay soft in the right places. To keep thinking. To keep asking. To keep noticing. To keep living with eyes wide open even when reality would probably be easier to swallow half asleep.

I don’t know.

But I know I would rather be deeply alive than comfortably numb. Even on the days when that makes me tired.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still trying to understand life without letting the need to understand it steal the life itself.