When It Unbalances You…

You know what frustrates me the most?
It’s not the drive-ins.
It’s not the spying.
It’s not the quiet little power plays people pretend don’t exist.

It’s how it makes me feel.
How it seeps under my skin, unbalances me, and steals my peace. How I can be pulling weeds, minding my own business, or sipping a cup of tea, and then, one glance, one turn of a car in the yard, and my stomach tightens. My mind races. My whole nervous system kicks into a gear I didn’t ask for.

And then comes the worst bit:
The inner war.
The part of me that says, “For God’s sake, it was nothing.”
And the part of me that knows exactly what it was.

And I hate it.
Not him. Just the situation.
I hate that after everything I’ve lived through, it can still knock me off-center.
I hate that I have to waste my precious energy steadying myself again.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about surviving this kind of slow, quiet, long-term intimidation:
It doesn’t have to be loud to leave a mark.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic for your soul to remember it.
And it sure as hell doesn’t have to be “a big deal” for it to undo your whole day.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to earn my right to be unsettled.
Like unless he kicks the door in or shouts in my face, it doesn’t count.
It counts.
It counts because it unbalances me.
Because I know what it is.
And because my peace matters.

I’m writing this now not because I have a tidy moral to tie it up with.
Not because I’m “choosing peace” or sending love to my enemies.
But because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is admit, “This messed me up today.”

And that’s enough.

Lesson for today:
Sometimes, naming the thing is the only healing you can do in the moment. And that’s okay.