The Sadness Haze & The News That Didn’t Know How to Feel Good

Day 18 — December 11, 2025

Today was trying.

Not catastrophic, not apocalyptic, just mentally exhausting in that “I’m doing everything right but still feel wrong” kind of way. I was fairly productive. The annoying kind of productive where you get things done but feel like you did nothing at all.

But the sadness haze? She’s still here.

Swimming laps around my ribcage like she’s training for the Emotional Olympics. And because my brain loves a challenge, I spent half the day being unnecessarily hard on myself. Which is, objectively, the last thing I need while I’m already wobbling like an emotional newborn deer.

Everyone keeps telling me to “be gentle with myself.” It sounds lovely in theory, like a weighted blanket for the soul. But in practice? Some days being gentle feels like trying to hug a porcupine while blindfolded.

I didn’t cry today. Until I did. Because I got an update.

Just a small one. But small updates have a way of hitting like grenades when your heart is already tender.

It was “good news.”

The kind of good news that still manages to feel awful. The kind that doesn’t land softly, but lands true.

He finally went to the police station. With an attorney. And refused to give a statement. Said nothing. Offered nothing. Closed his mouth like a man who knows exactly what he’s done and has no interest in saying it out loud.

Some people would call that bittersweet. Some would call it a double-edged sword.

I’m calling it what it is. Awful. Heavy. Predictable. And still somehow a small step forward.

Because silence is a statement.

And his silence? It says plenty.

It cracked something open in me.

Not devastation. That’s too easy. Something sharper. Something steadier. A quiet, rising refusal to keep letting life take pieces of me without consent.

I’m tired of living idly. Tired of surviving in place. Tired of my life being shaped by someone else’s violence instead of my own choosing.

Today didn’t resolve anything.
But it did clarify something:

I am done being a passive character in my own story. Even on days when sadness drags behind me like a shadow with an attitude, I am still moving. Still choosing. Still claiming myself in ways I never knew how to before.

And that in its own messy, painful way is a kind of progress.

Chaos in one hand.
Grace in the other.
And me refusing to disappear into the silence he chose.