Radiant

Day 144 – April 16, 2026

I’ve been thinking about radiance.

Not beauty exactly, though obviously they can be cousins. Not glow in the shallow sense either. Not the kind people try to buy in bottles, filters, face serums, ring lights, or soft little lies about “wellness” from women who have never once had to survive anything uglier than a text message with bad punctuation.

I mean something deeper than that.

Radiance.

The kind that doesn’t come from perfection. The kind that comes from life moving all the way through a person and not managing to put her out.

That interests me.

Because I think for a long time I understood radiance too superficially. I thought it was ease. Freshness. Youth. A woman unmarked enough to still appear untouched by anything too heavy. Soft light. Nice skin. Nice hair. A body that cooperates. A mood that photographs well.

Cute.

But the older I get, and the more I live, the more I realize the women who truly radiate are rarely the untouched ones.

They are the women who have been through something and remain lit anyway.

Not because pain improved them. I will die irritated before I let people turn suffering into some kind of tasteful cosmetic procedure for the soul. But because some women go through hell and come back with a more concentrated life in them. A kind of heat. A current. A density. Something in the eyes. Something in the way they enter a room without asking for permission to be there.

That is radiance to me now.

A woman who has lived enough to know exactly what darkness feels like and still chooses beauty without becoming stupid about it.

That is not innocence.

That is power with its makeup done.

And maybe that’s part of what I’m learning about myself too. That whatever this thing is in me now. This confidence people seem to notice, this intensity, this warmth, this edge, this strange little mix of softness and intrigue and humor and grief and intelligence, maybe that’s a form of radiance too.

Not because I am untouched. Because I am not. Not because what happened to me did not scar me. It did. Not because the disappointment, the anger, the hurt, the absolute obscenity of him still being free while I am the one learning how to live around all this don’t still move through me. They do.

But still. I am lit. That gets me sometimes.

Because there were so many reasons to go dim. So many reasons to shrink, harden, disappear, become purely functional, become one note, become “strong” in that dead way people admire from across the room because it costs them nothing.

I didn’t.

I stayed colorful. I stayed observant. I stayed funny. I stayed too alive in exactly the way that makes some people fall in love and others get a little uncomfortable because they can feel, even if they don’t have language for it, that I am not sleepwalking through this life.

That matters to me.

And maybe that’s why radiance feels like the right word. Because it implies something coming from within. Not performance. Not decoration. Not the polished surface of a life no one has lived in deeply enough to disturb.

Internal light.

The kind that remains after fire. The kind that gets sharper in contrast. The kind that says yes, I have been through it. Yes, I know what the dark looks like. And no, I will not hand it the whole atmosphere of my face.

Roger, naturally, remains radiant in the way only a dog can be. Entirely unembarrassed by his own joy. Entirely convinced he deserves the center of the room. Entirely willing to move from deep sleep to ecstatic delight in under four seconds if he hears a wrapper.

Honestly? Visionary.

There is something about that kind of uninhibited presence that teaches me things. The refusal to dim for no reason. The willingness to feel what you feel fully. The certainty that your joy does not need to justify itself in order to exist.

I want more of that. Not in a shallow way. In a rooted way. I do not want to merely look radiant. I want to live like someone whose light belongs to her.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still lit from within in ways no one who tried to break me could ever have earned the right to understand.