Sandpaper to the Soul

Some days don’t cut. They grind.

I’m sure you know the kind of day. If you’ve been around long enough, and who hasn’t these days, you’ve no doubt had one yourself. We’re talking the kind of day where it feels like someone took sandpaper to your soul—roughing up every nerve ending until even breathing feels like a task. There’s no blood, no bruises. Just this aching raw feeling you carry around. Sure you can pretend it doesn’t hurt every time something brushes up against it, and you might even be good at hiding it, but it’s there.

Today was one of those days.

It started with silence. At first the good kind of silence. Even if my dog was sick and I had to clean the carpet. There was silence. But then it changed. The type of silence—heavy, loaded, weaponized. The kind that fills a room even when no one’s talking, thick with everything left unsaid.

I tried to keep my head down. Tried to focus on one of the hundred other things I have going on. But grief doesn’t respect your to-do list. It seeps into everything—your coffee, your emails, the way your jaw clenches when someone asks how you’re doing and you say “I’m fine.”

I’m not fine.

I’m functioning. I’m moving. I’m still here.

But fine? Fuck no. That’s just a word I use…well, fuck—it’s the word we all use so that no one asks more questions than we’re ready to answer.

And today? Today the universe didn’t wait for me to get steady. It just kept piling on.

Something small cracked it open. Not a shout. Not a blow-up. Just that feeling you get when you watch someone bully a person who didn’t deserve it. When someone with power or presence or just plain cruelty decides they need to make themselves feel better by making someone else feel small. And you’re stuck there, watching it happen, and even though you speak up—or maybe because you do—it all lands on you instead.

That’s the kind of raw today was. Yes, I know you’re sitting there reading this and you’re jealous. You wanted, no, needed a day like this, right? No. I didn’t think so.

Today I felt the ache of knowing I tried to do the right thing, and it didn’t help. Today felt the sting of watching someone get hurt and realizing my words offered no protection. It wasn’t the armor I thought it would be—just more shrapnel. And the best part of today was the ultimate regret for trying to step in and do the right thing only to get burned.

The thing about sandpaper, though? It doesn’t just hurt. It shapes. It wears things down, sure—but sometimes that’s the only way to get to what’s underneath.

Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe I’m not being broken down.

Maybe I’m just being reshaped.