Rooted

Day 135 – April 7, 2026

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be rooted. Not stuck. Not trapped. Not stationary in that dead, joyless way people sometimes confuse with stability. Rooted. There’s a difference.

Because being rooted is not about never moving. It’s about knowing what in you stays when everything around you gets weird, cruel, beautiful, unstable, disappointing, or suddenly much more expensive than it had any right to be.

That’s what I’ve been circling today. What stays. What in me held. What in me refused to go under even when I was scared enough to understand how easy it would have been to become smaller, harder, quieter, flatter, or just vaguely absent from my own life in a way polite people might still call “functioning.”

There were so many opportunities for that.

And yet here I am. Still emotional. Still observant. Still wanting beautiful things. Still capable of laughter in the middle of darkness, which may actually be one of the more deranged and admirable things about me.

That didn’t come from nowhere. That’s roots.

I think for a long time I misunderstood rootedness. I thought it meant certainty. Calm. A life with enough order that your feet always knew what they were standing on. But now? Now I think being rooted is much less tidy than that.

It’s not certainty.

It’s relationship.

To your body. To your truth. To your instincts. To the people and creatures and rituals that keep you from floating off into psychic weather every time life gets theatrical.

That is rootedness to me now.

Morning coffee. Roger’s nails on the floor. The women who hold me correctly. The fact that I still write. The fact that I still care. The fact that I can still feel the light change in a room and let it matter.

Those are roots too.

And maybe that’s the part I’m finally understanding. Roots are not always glamorous. They are not all sacred poetry and feminine mystery and tasteful earth toned metaphors. Sometimes roots are plain. Practical. Slightly ridiculous. A dog who won’t let you disappear. A routine. A sentence. A refusal. A body that is still learning the difference between danger and peace and somehow still agrees to keep trying.

What happened to me tried to uproot me. That’s the truth.

It tried to rip me out of my sense of safety, my sense of self, my sense of where and how I belonged in my own life. It tried to make everything feel less trustworthy, the body, the world, men, systems, space, time, even quiet itself in certain moments.

And some days I still feel the violence of that.

I still feel how unnatural it is to be expected to continue while carrying something this real. I still feel the heartbreak of him being free while I’m the one learning how to root myself back into a life that should have never been split this way in the first place.

That is still here. But so am I.

And I think that’s what makes rootedness powerful. Not because I transcended pain. Because pain did not uproot the whole woman. It took things. It changed things. It sharpened things. But it did not take everything that holds me to the earth.

I am still held by something deeper than what happened.

Roger, naturally, is the most rooted creature I know. He trusts the ground. He trusts his body. He trusts his love. He trusts that if he stands directly in my path while I’m carrying something, somehow I will simply work around him because obviously his need to be exactly there outweighs all structural concerns.

And honestly, there’s something to that too. The total lack of apology in taking up your space. The confidence of belonging where you are.

Maybe rootedness is partly that. Not needing to earn your right to be here every day. I would like more of that.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, growing roots in places pain did not think to look.