Day 140 – April 12, 2026

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be chosen. And also what it means to choose. Both are more complicated than people make them sound.

Because “chosen” is one of those words that can feel beautiful or terrifying depending on the memory standing closest to it. There is one kind, the people, creatures, and moments that find you and say, in a thousand small ways, yes, you belong here. And then there is the other kind. The darker kind. The kind I did not ask for. The kind that still makes my stomach turn when I think about how much violence can hide inside another person’s decision to single you out.

Both truths live in me now. And I hate that.

I hate that a word like “chosen” has to carry both tenderness and threat in my body. I hate that I know, in such intimate terms, what it means to be chosen by harm. To be picked by cruelty. To have someone else’s sickness, ego, violence, or appetite alter the shape of your life against your will.

There is no poetry in that. There is only damage and aftermath and the unbearable insult of having to keep existing around it. But there is another truth too.

I have also been chosen by love.

By Roger, obviously, who took one look at me and made the emotionally reasonable decision to become obsessed forever. By chosen family. By women who know how to hold me correctly. By people who did not just stumble into my life, but stayed, protected, laughed, listened, challenged, and made it clear that my existence was not an inconvenience to be managed but a life to be met.

That kind of chosen feels different in the body.

It does not grip. It does not take. It does not demand. It does not invade.

It welcomes.

It says you don’t have to perform your worth here. You don’t have to make your pain easier to digest. You don’t have to be less complicated to be loved. You don’t have to translate yourself into something safer before you’re allowed to take up space.

That kind of chosen is medicine. And choosing matters too.

Because I am learning, more and more, that after violation, choosing becomes sacred. Choosing what stays near me. Choosing who gets access. Choosing what I believe. Choosing what kind of woman I want to be inside this life. Choosing not to let what happened become the whole architecture of my identity. Choosing tenderness where it is earned. Choosing refusal where it is needed. Choosing, over and over again, not disappearance.

That is not a small thing. That is my life.

And maybe that’s the real path I’m on now. Not just trying to survive being chosen by the wrong thing, but learning how to choose back. Better. Cleaner. More honestly. With more nerve and less apology. With better instincts. With actual standards. With a much lower tolerance for anything that asks me to betray myself in exchange for belonging.

No.

If I belong somewhere now, it has to be somewhere I can stay whole.

Roger, naturally, chooses me every single day with the full sincerity of a creature who has no doubts, no irony, and no interest in emotional subtlety. He has decided I am home and sees no reason to revisit the matter.

And it reminds me that maybe the right kind of chosen feels simple, even when life is not. Not easy. But clear. Not perfect. But safe enough to exhale in.

That is what I want more of. And that is what I intend to keep choosing.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, learning the difference between being chosen by harm and being chosen by love.