The Insult of Continuation

Day 116 – March 19, 2026

There is something deeply insulting about being expected to just keep living. That’s the thought I had today. Not because I want my life to stop. Not because I am giving up. Not because I don’t know there are still beautiful things here. I do. I know all of that.

But there is still something almost unbearable about the fact that I am the one carrying all this aftermath while the man who did this to me is still out there moving through the world like a person with a future. Like a person with errands. Plans. Opinions. Lunch. Sleep. Probably jokes.

That destroys me in ways I do not always know how to say cleanly.

Because what happened to me was real. It was not “complicated.” It was not a misunderstanding. It was not a blurry little moral gray area people can tuck into language soft enough to keep themselves comfortable. It was violent. It was violation. It altered the architecture of my life.

And somehow I am still the one expected to be graceful about the continuation of everything. To keep going. To heal. To navigate systems. To explain. To remember. To carry the body. To carry the fear. To carry the anger. To carry the fact that he is still free while I am the one paying interest on his crime every single day in my nervous system.

That is obscene. And I am tired of pretending it is not.

I think that’s part of what hurts so much too. The disappointment. The not being seen properly. The not being heard at the level this deserves. The way something this enormous can happen and still leave you standing in ordinary rooms trying to explain why your heart feels shattered and your anger feels radioactive and your grief keeps shape shifting into exhaustion, disbelief, disgust, and this almost feral sadness.

I am disappointed in people.

In systems. In the glacial stupidity of justice. In the casualness with which the world allows women to carry devastation while men carry on. That sentence alone makes me want to bite through drywall. Because I am expected to live a life.

And I am. I am doing it. Coffee. Writing. Publishing. Walking Roger. Breathing through it. Continuing. Being brave in all these unsexy ways no one writes songs about. But some days it does not feel noble. Some days it feels like insult layered on top of injury.

Like the world saying, “Yes, terrible, anyway keep moving.”

No. Not anyway. Not without saying how violent that is too.

There is a grief in being expected to normalize yourself around what should have never been normalized. There is heartbreak in realizing that while I am over here trying to stitch myself back into something livable, he is still free. Still uncontained. Still occupying the world like it belongs to him.

That knowledge sits in me like broken glass.

And it is not making me wiser today. It is making me angry. But I think I’m allowed that.

Roger, for his part, spent part of the day looking at me with that deep, loving, uncomplicated concern he gets when he knows something in me is heavy. No language. No explanations. Just presence. Just his big ridiculous playful teddy bear self quietly insisting that I am not alone in the room.

Sometimes that is the only kind of honesty I can stand.

Because he doesn’t ask me to make it inspirational. He doesn’t ask me to turn it into growth. He just stays. And today, staying feels like the best I can do.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And the insult of continuation still burning in a woman who should have been protected better than this.