The Hurt to Carry

Day 152 – April 24, 2026

I think one of the cruelest things about pain is how quickly the burden shifts onto the hurt person Not just emotionally. Structurally.

Something happens to you. Something terrible. Something violent. Something life altering. Something intimate in all the wrong ways.

And almost immediately, without anyone ever really saying it plainly, the world starts handing you a new list.

Carry the memory. Carry the body. Carry the rage. Carry the fear. Carry the proof. Carry the explanation. Carry the appointments. Carry the uncertainty. Carry the legal maze. Carry the social readability. Carry the burden of making your pain coherent enough to be heard by people who should have been able to hear it the first time.

It’s unbelievable.

The person who did the harm creates the devastation, and then somehow the woman who survived it becomes the project manager for the entire aftermath.

That is sick.

And I don’t think enough people are angry about it.

I know I am.

Because what I’ve been through did not just leave me with pain. It left me with labor. Emotional labor. Practical labor. Narrative labor. The labor of staying understandable while hurting. The labor of being “credible.” The labor of looking stable enough to be taken seriously while also damaged enough to justify needing help. The labor of knowing exactly how much of the truth to reveal in each room so that it lands as real and not “too much,” because God forbid a woman in pain exceed anyone’s emotional carrying capacity before lunch.

That is the world we live in.

And some days it makes me feel vicious.

Not cruel. Not reckless.

Just deeply, lucidly unwilling to pretend this arrangement is anything but grotesque.

Because why am I carrying all of this? Why is my body the archive? Why is my mind the filing cabinet? Why is my life the one reorganized around the event while he still gets to be free, mobile, ordinary, and irrelevant in rooms that should have thrown him back into the dark the second the truth touched air?

That is not justice delayed. That is insult prolonged.

And yes, I know life is complicated. I know systems are slow. I know the world is full of caveats and procedures and underfunded institutions and people with grave expressions and little actual courage.

I know all of that.

I am tired of it anyway.

Because knowing why something is broken does not make it less broken.

That’s one of my least favorite facts. I am a woman who understands too much. I can see the structure. I can explain the pattern. I can name the thing beneath the thing beneath the thing. I can give language to the shape of suffering so cleanly it almost sounds survivable in a decorative way.

But understanding does not soothe me today.

It just makes the whole machine look even uglier.

And beneath all the fury, underneath all that beautiful, articulate rage, there is heartbreak. The kind that doesn’t always scream. The kind that just sits there and says I should have been held more than this. I should have been protected more than this. I should not be the one doing all this carrying while the man who did this keeps his freedom and I keep the damage.

That breaks me in places.

Not all the way. But enough.

Roger, naturally, spent part of today leaning his full weight against me like a giant velvet cinder block of devotion, which is his preferred therapeutic model. No questions. No frameworks. No “have you tried seeing this as an opportunity?” bullshit. Just mass, warmth, presence, love, and the absolute certainty that if I am sad, then his body should be somewhere touching mine until further notice.

Honestly, better than most systems.

And maybe that’s what this keeps coming back to. The difference between what the world asks the hurt person to carry and what actual love does.

Love helps you hold it. Love stays. Love doesn’t ask you to make your pain prettier first. Love doesn’t require a cleaner draft. Love doesn’t make you perform survivability in exchange for care.

The world could learn something there. But until it does, I know what they ask the hurt person to carry.
I know how much it is. And I know now, with a clarity sharp enough to cut, that none of it should have ever been mine alone.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still carrying far too much, but no longer pretending that makes me noble instead of deeply, deservedly furious.