I Don’t Want My Worst Thing to Be My Most Interesting Thing

Day 226 – July 7, 2026

I have been thinking about how easy it is for the worst thing that happened to a person to become the most interesting thing about them. Not necessarily to themselves. To everyone else.

Pain has gravity. People lean toward it. Ask someone about the hardest thing they have survived and suddenly the room gets quiet. Ask what they are curious about lately and somehow everybody needs to check their phone.

We are strange creatures.

I understand the attraction. Survival stories have shape. Something happened. Somebody endured it. Maybe they changed. Maybe they fought. Maybe there is a lesson at the end that can be packaged into a sentence suitable for a mug.

Real life is less cooperative. Sometimes there is no lesson. Sometimes something terrible happens and the only profound conclusion is that it was terrible and should not have happened. That is enough.

I think about this because so much of this journal exists because of what happened to me. There is no pretending otherwise. Trauma is woven through these pages because it was woven through my days. But I do not want that to become the most interesting thing about me. Not even close.

I am interested in too much.

I want to talk about writing and culture and beauty and people and why some objects are inexplicably better designed than others. I want to wonder why waffles are architecturally superior to pancakes without being accused of abandoning the serious work of healing.

I contain range. So does everybody. That is the part I think gets lost when we reduce people to what they survived. A person can be traumatized and hilarious. Grieving and horny. Terrified and ambitious. Deeply sad and extremely irritated that the grocery store stopped carrying the good yogurt.

Life does not respect categories. Thank Goodness. I do not want mine to either.

For months, what happened took up so much room that almost everything else had to squeeze around it. That made sense. Pain is not polite. It does not arrive, survey the available space, and say, “I’ll just take this little corner.”

It moves in. Rearranges the furniture. Changes the Wi-Fi password. Suddenly you are paying rent to your own nervous system. But lately, other things are moving back in.

Curiosity. Work. Humor. Ambition. Beauty. Annoyance. Desire. Ideas.

The completely unreasonable satisfaction of getting one sentence exactly right. These things do not erase trauma. They crowd it. I like that.

Maybe healing is partly an issue of square footage. The thing that happened still occupies a room. I am not pretending I can evict it. But it does not get the entire house anymore. There is a kitchen now. There is music somewhere. Roger has claimed several pieces of furniture without contributing financially. There are plans taped to the walls. There is work on the table. There are people coming through the door. There is life happening around the damage.

That image feels closer to where I am now than any idea of “getting over it.” I am not over it. I may never be. But I am increasingly around it. Beyond it. Beside it. Some days nowhere near it. That is something. And maybe someday somebody will meet me, read something I wrote, work with me, laugh with me, or know me for years without the worst thing ever becoming the headline.

I would like that. Not because I am ashamed of what happened. Because there is so much more here.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And a whole house the worst thing does not get to own.