Chosen Again

Day 171 – May 13, 2026

I keep coming back to this idea of being chosen.

Not in the romantic, glittery sense where people act like being chosen is always flattering, always healing, always some sweet little confirmation that the world knows what to do with you.

I know better than that.

I know what it means to be chosen by the wrong thing. By violence. By harm. By someone else’s sickness landing in your life like it belongs there. I know what it means to be singled out in a way that leaves damage behind.

That truth does not leave me. It lives in the bones now.

So when I say “chosen,” I mean something much more exact.

I mean the sacred version. The hard won version. The version that feels like life putting its hand back on your shoulder after it let something terrible happen and saying, no, not only that. not only that.

Because lately I’ve been noticing how often I have, in fact, been chosen again.

By my friends. By my family. By the people who know how to show up without making it weird.
By the ones who don’t just “support” me in the fake social media way, but actually stay, listen, laugh, challenge me, and love me like I’m worth the full effort.

Which, obviously, I am.

Roger chooses me every day too, with the unwavering certainty of a dog who has decided I am the center of all spiritually legitimate activity and sees no reason to revisit the matter.

He’s right.

I admire that kind of commitment.

There’s something really moving about being chosen by things that don’t ask you to shrink first. By people who don’t need you quieter, easier, less intense, less observant, less alive. By love that doesn’t feel like a negotiation or a trap or a weird little social hostage situation where everyone’s pretending not to notice the tension.

That’s the good stuff.

That’s the version I want more of.

Because I think one of the worst things harm does is teach your body that attention itself might be dangerous. That closeness might cost. That being wanted might not be the blessing everybody keeps trying to sell it as.

So every time I’m chosen by something good now, it matters.

A clean room. A loving gesture. A friend who really gets it. A woman who knows how to care for me without turning it into a group project. A dog who looks at me like I hung the moon and also, possibly, invented dinner.

That all counts.

And maybe that’s what I’m learning is that being chosen by love feels calm. It feels clear. It feels like my body can stay in the room. It doesn’t come with static or confusion or that little internal legal team preparing opening statements just in case.

Beautiful. Deeply overdue. But beautiful.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, chosen again by the kind of love that doesn’t take, it stays.