Bad Publicity

Day 174 – May 16, 2026

My nervous system desperately needs a better publicist. Because the current messaging is a mess.

The brand identity appears to be, “She’s fine.” followed immediately by, “She is absolutely not fine.” followed moments later by, “Actually she’s hilarious, stunning, intuitive, and weirdly calm about this.”
and then, without warning, “Sound the alarms, a car door slammed a block away.”

It’s exhausting.

And deeply confusing for everyone involved, including me.

That’s what I was thinking about today. How ridiculous it is to be a person with a nervous system that has, at various points, been a brilliant protector, an overachieving lunatic, a historian, and the emotional equivalent of a small town gossip who assumes every disturbance means something catastrophic is about to happen.

Which, to be fair, is what trauma does.

It trains the body to become a little overfamiliar with danger. It makes your senses ambitious. It turns your startle response into a woman named Denise who has no boundaries and thinks every minor inconvenience deserves a full press conference.

And while I understand the impulse, I would still like to file a complaint.

Because I am tired of having such a nice exterior and such a dramatic internal emergency response team. It feels unfair. I do think my body could at least occasionally stop behaving like it’s one suspicious noise away from declaring martial law.

Just a thought.

But then again, I also know better than to be cruel about it. My nervous system is not the villain. She’s just overworked. She has seen too much. She is trying very hard to keep me alive with outdated data and absolutely no chill.

Respectfully, I would still like to demote her.

Not fire her. Just maybe move her into a less public facing role.

Because I do not need every soft moment triple checked for hidden knives. I do not need every change in tone treated like a possible betrayal. I do not need the emotional atmosphere of a perfectly normal afternoon translated into a suspense film just because the body remembers what the mind was once forced to learn all at once.

That’s too much plot for a Thursday.

Roger, meanwhile, continues to model a much healthier range of responses. If something feels wrong, he investigates. If the investigation reveals no immediate apocalypse, he returns to whatever he was doing, usually with the full confidence of a man who believes he personally prevented disaster through sheer presence.

Honestly? I admire the efficiency.

Meanwhile, I’ll still be in the kitchen processing one weird vibe from earlier like I’m writing a doctoral dissertation.

Again, exhausting.

And yet I can laugh about it now in ways I couldn’t before, which does matter. Not because the underlying thing is funny, but because the absurdity of being alive in a body like this sometimes absolutely is. The body panics. The mind explains. The heart wants softness. The soul wants beauty. The dog wants snacks. Everybody has an agenda and somehow I’m supposed to come out of that looking emotionally stable.

Still, there is progress in this. I can feel it. The panic doesn’t get the final word anymore. The body can flare without fully taking over the house. The day can recover. I can recover. I can notice what’s happening without immediately handing it the wheel and a playlist.

That’s growth, annoyingly.

Not glamorous growth. Not inspirational growth. Just the practical kind where you become slightly better at coexisting with your own internal chaos without letting it redecorate the whole property every time somebody coughs wrong. I’ll take it.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still trying to rebrand a nervous system.