Being Held by Ordinary Things

Day 161 – May 3, 2026

There are days when what keeps me together is not profound. Not love in some grand sweeping form. Not clarity. Not a breakthrough. Not healing with a soundtrack. Not a big lesson or one perfect sentence descending from the heavens to explain my own life back to me in emotionally organized bullet points.

Sometimes what keeps me here is smaller than that.

A cup of coffee. Roger’s weight against me. The rhythm of a walk. A text from someone I trust. A decent light in the room. The familiar geography of my own apartment. The sheer relief of a day that does not demand spectacle.

I’ve been thinking about that today. About the ordinary things that hold me.

And I think that matters more than people realize. We are all trained to look for the big dramatic forms of meaning. The big love. The big losses. The big turning points. The big declarations. The big moments where life feels cinematic enough to justify its own intensity.

But a lot of real life is quieter than that.

A lot of real life is maintenance. Rhythm. Repetition. The unglamorous but sacred business of staying attached to the little things that keep your soul from slipping all over the floor.

That’s especially true after trauma.

Because once something violent interrupts your life, the ordinary stops being invisible. Or maybe it becomes newly holy. The familiar chair. The dog’s breathing. The way morning enters the kitchen. The specific route of a walk. The person who makes the room feel easier on your body. Those things stop being “small.” They become part of your nervous system’s language for still here, still safe enough, still alive enough to continue.

That’s huge.

And yes, I know how unsexy that sounds from the outside. “She was held together by coffee and routine” is not exactly the kind of sentence people embroider on pillows unless the pillows are for women with excellent taste and unresolved psychological range.

But it’s true.

The ordinary has held me.

Roger has held me. My loved ones have held me. My friends have held me. Writing has held me. Even the repetition of certain days has held me. The fact that I can still make something, still notice something, still laugh at something stupid enough to interrupt the heaviness for a second.

That kind of holding counts.

Actually, no. It counts more than almost anything.

Because it doesn’t ask me to perform. It doesn’t ask me to become inspirational. It doesn’t ask me to be “better” before it works. It just works.

Roger, naturally, has spent the day practicing his own version of emotional holding, which seems to consist of remaining within six feet of me at all times, sighing dramatically whenever I leave the room, and making it abundantly clear that whatever is happening in my emotional weather should absolutely involve him and, ideally, a blanket.

He is not wrong.

There is something deeply healing about being loved by a creature so thoroughly convinced that your existence is central to the universe.

I recommend it.

And maybe that’s the mood I want to keep for May. Not chasing something. Not trying to make every feeling profound enough to deserve attention. Just noticing what already holds. What already works. What already steadies. What already says, in a thousand ordinary ways, you can stay in your life today.

That is more than enough.

Especially for a woman who has had to work this hard to make “enough” feel real again.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still being held by ordinary things sturdy enough to count as miracles.