What They Don’t Carry
Day 117 – March 20, 2026
There are things other people do not carry. That sounds obvious until you are the one carrying them.
Because from the outside, I think a lot of suffering looks invisible if it is not actively screaming. If a woman is still dressed, still speaking in full sentences, still posting, still walking her dog, still making coffee, still answering messages with punctuation and some version of social readability, people assume she must somehow be functioning on terms that make sense.
Cute.
What they don’t see is what they don’t carry.
They don’t carry the replay. They don’t carry the body memory. They don’t carry the humiliation. They don’t carry the fury. They don’t carry the way the day can split open over one small thing and suddenly you are right back in contact with the full emotional voltage of what was done to you. They don’t carry the insult of him being free while your body is still acting like it has to personally prepare for war every time life gets weird around the edges.
They don’t carry the heartbreak of not being adequately seen. And that part may be one of the cruelest.
Because I am not just angry at what happened. I am angry at how alone reality can feel after something like this. How poorly people understand the depth of it. How often the world asks for coherence from the harmed person while extending endless patience, ambiguity, and logistical time to the man who caused the harm in the first place.
He is free.
That sentence is revolting every time I think it. He is free, and I am the one expected to do the emotional labor of surviving him.
That is the kind of truth that rearranges your faith in things.
In justice. In safety. In the social contract. In the fantasy that if something bad enough happens, surely the world will respond with the urgency it deserves. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it just leaves you there holding it.
And I am holding so much.
Anger, yes. But beneath the anger is this grief that feels almost too tender to touch directly. The grief of not being fully held by systems that should have mattered. The grief of needing more from people than they knew how to give. The grief of understanding that some of the most life altering pain a person can endure will still be met, in many corners of the world, with procedural delays, awkward silences, shallow reassurances, and a profoundly mediocre ability to bear witness.
That shatters something. It shattered something in me.
Not my intelligence. Not my will. Not my voice. But some gentler assumption I had that if the truth were bad enough, people would recognize it cleanly. They often do not. And I hate that.
Today I kept thinking about all the things I carry that other people never have to consider. The extra calculations. The extra vigilance. The extra emotional tax on very ordinary moments. The way freedom itself now has texture. Risk. Cost. The way even peace sometimes arrives with conditions because my body has been taught too much against my will.
That is real. And I am tired of making it sound prettier than it is.
Roger however remains fully convinced that my sadness is both unacceptable and correctable through proximity, dramatic sighs, and looking at me like I am the most important thing in the room.
He may be onto something.
Because when I am most disappointed in humanity, what gets me through is rarely some brilliant system or perfectly formed sentence. It is usually something simpler. Presence. Loyalty. A dog who does not question the validity of my pain or ask me to package it into something uplifting before I’m allowed to put it down for a second.
That kind of love is not small. Especially now.
Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.
And me, carrying what they don’t, and still somehow refusing to disappear inside the weight of it.
