What Still Feels Like Mine

Day 179 – May 21, 2026

There are parts of life that still feel undeniably mine. That may sound obvious until you’ve lived through something that scrambles your relationship to your own body, your own days, your own sense of safety, your own internal ownership of what should have been simple. Then it becomes a much bigger thing.

Because violation doesn’t just hurt. It trespasses. It makes parts of your life feel less yours for a while. Less cleanly yours. Less easy to inhabit without static, without memory, without the strange private insult of knowing someone else’s ugliness tried to write itself into places it never belonged.

That’s real.

So when something still feels mine now, I notice.

The page feels mine. My voice feels mine. Roger definitely feels mine, though he would probably argue that I am his and honestly he has a strong case. My humor feels mine. My taste feels mine. My ability to look at a day and still find one gorgeous, absurd, or painfully human thing worth saving in language, that feels deeply, stubbornly mine.

And I think that matters more than people realize.

Because healing is not always some radiant, linear reclamation where one day you wake up and everything has been spiritually dry cleaned and handed back to you with a nice note.

Sometimes it’s smaller than that. Sometimes it’s just noticing what still belongs to you and refusing to let go of it.

Your laugh. Your rituals. Your eye for beauty. Your standards. Your favorite mug. The way you still turn toward the light in a room. The fact that your softness is still intact, even if it now carries identification and stronger boundaries.

Those things count.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been gathering lately. Not all of myself at once, but pieces. Fragments. Proofs. These small undeniable territories of self that say, no, actually, this remains mine. This is still mine. This was hurt, maybe. This was interrupted. This was trespassed against. But it was not erased.

That’s powerful.

Not in the big cinematic way. In the private way. The way that matters when you’re alone in your kitchen, or walking the dog, or writing in the middle of a life that keeps expecting you to keep going without ever really pausing to appreciate how much grace it takes to continue with style.

I appreciate it, at least.

Roger appreciates it too, though his version of appreciation mostly involves aggressive closeness and the unwavering belief that if I sit down, he should immediately become part of the arrangement.

And maybe that’s the point of days like this. Not to figure everything out. Not to package survival into a clean insight. Just to notice the pieces of myself that remain so unmistakably mine that even pain couldn’t successfully counterfeit them.

My humor. My eye. My will. My warmth. My way with words. My refusal to become spiritually beige just because life got dark for a while.

That last one especially. Because some things life does not get to take. Some things it only reveals more clearly by trying.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, still gathering the pieces that remain mine and finding out they are stronger, prettier, and much less willing to leave than I was ever taught to expect.