I’m Starting to Recognize Her Again

Day 229 – July 10, 2026

I caught myself feeling like myself today. That sentence looks stupid written down. Who else would I feel like? But anyone who has ever gone through a period where life knocked them sideways probably understands exactly what I mean.

There is a version of yourself you recognize without having to inspect her. The laugh. The instincts. The ridiculous thoughts. The way excitement feels. The little things you care too much about. The confidence that appears in certain rooms. The specific flavor of your bullshit.

Mine disappeared for a while. Not completely. She would show up occasionally. A joke. A flash of attitude. An idea I got excited about. Then something would pull me backward and I would lose sight of her again. Trauma made me feel unfamiliar to myself. That may have been one of the hardest parts.

People talk about losing trust in the world after something terrible happens. Nobody talks quite as much about losing trust in your own normal. Is this how I react now? Is this who I am now? Am I always going to be afraid of this? Was I always this anxious? Why can’t I do something that used to be easy?

You start watching yourself like a stranger. I hated that. I wanted myself back.

For a long time I thought that meant becoming exactly who I had been before. I know now that is impossible. Also, increasingly, undesirable. There were things about the woman I was before that I loved. There were also ways she abandoned herself. Ways she trusted people she should not have. Ways she bent when she should have stood still. Ways she made herself easier to accommodate everybody else.

I do not particularly want those back.

So the woman I am beginning to recognize is not exactly the old one. She is familiar, though. She laughs like her. She gets excited like her. She has the same completely unreasonable curiosity. She still wants beauty around her because apparently we are committed to making every surface unnecessarily attractive. She still falls in love with ideas at dangerous speeds. She still thinks she can probably figure something out if given an internet connection and sufficient coffee.

But there is something else now.

Edges. Better ones. A stronger no. A less apologetic yes. A growing unwillingness to spend my life explaining myself to people committed to misunderstanding me. I like her. That matters more than I expected. Because there were periods when I did not know whether I would.

There is so much conversation about rebuilding after trauma as if the goal is simply functionality. Can you work? Can you sleep? Can you leave the house? Can you perform the basic administrative duties associated with existing? Those things matter. But I wanted more than functional.

I wanted recognizable.

I wanted to laugh and hear myself in it. I wanted to get excited about an idea and feel that familiar electricity. I wanted to look at something I made and think, yes, that is mine. I wanted to want things again. I wanted my personality back from evidence storage.

It is happening. Slowly. Not every day. There are still mornings where I feel like the scared version of myself is standing closest to the surface. There are still nights when something drags me backward. But increasingly, when I come back, I know where I am returning to.

Me.

Not the old me. Not some healed, enlightened future me who drinks herbal tea and has transcended anxiety. This one. The woman sitting here now. A little battered. A lot smarter. Still funny. Still curious. Still capable of getting absurdly excited over a website. Still here.

And finally, increasingly, familiar.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And when I catch my reflection lately, I know that woman.