What The Body Remembers: Letters Never Sent

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Content note: Wishing not to have woken up, self-blame around illness, healing without resolution, long-term chronic illness, family harm.
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The Archive

About a week after leaving the ICU, still bruised and dizzy from brain surgery, I pushed myself onto a trail in December. Snow on the ground, heading toward the ice caverns near Mt. Baker. I needed proof I was still me.

It was a farewell.

The autoimmune cascade that followed pulled me under for years. That hike was my last for seven and a half years.

What I didn’t understand then: my body wasn’t the enemy. It was the messenger.

Each spasm was the nervous system saying I’m not safe. Each wave of fatigue: I need help. Each spike of pain: Please slow down.

Long before we have words for experience, the nervous system keeps score. It registers tone, threat, rupture, silence. It learns how safe the world is and carries those lessons forward. Trauma isn’t just an old story. It’s a live signal pulsing through the body long after the moment passed. Tightness in the chest, shallow breath, bone-deep fatigue, a startle too quick or too big — these are the archives of survival.

For years, I didn’t understand this. I thought my body was betraying me. Every flare felt like sabotage. Every symptom felt like rebellion. The logic seemed clear: if I could discipline my body into compliance, I’d win. But the harder I pushed, the harder it pushed back.

I cursed my body for being weak. I treated rest like giving up and pain like moral failure.

Healing didn’t come from winning the war. It came from ending it. From learning to treat my body not as battlefield, but as companion.

The war ended when I stopped seeing my body as the thing that was wrong with me and started seeing it as the thing that kept me alive.

The Betrayal We Learn

I grew up with no blueprint for boundaries. I learned endurance, compliance, over-functioning. By the time I collapsed, the pattern was complete: yes when I meant no, work when I was breaking down, space for everyone else but not myself.

I didn’t experience this as self-betrayal. I experienced it as competence. The more I could absorb, the more invisible the cost, the better I thought I was doing. My body kept the actual accounts.

By the time I noticed the debt, I was already bankrupt.

Coming back to myself meant learning a new language: the language of limits.

Healing Without Resolution

For a long time, I thought healing meant reconciliation. I believed making peace with the people who caused harm would set me free.

When reconciliation proved impossible, I turned the demand inward: maybe if I could just forgive myself, the story would stop echoing.

But trauma doesn’t wait for apologies. It wires itself into the nervous system, carrying the past forward whether anyone remembers or not.

I believed that weight was mine to hold. That if I were stronger, more forgiving, less fragile, I wouldn’t still be hurting. Shame became the inheritance I couldn’t put down.

The harshest critic lives inside. I blamed myself for not being stronger, for not seeing it coming, for not healing faster.

Sometimes the person who caused the most lasting harm was me: pushing through pain, ignoring exhaustion, abandoning my body’s wisdom in service of impossible standards.

The forest doesn’t ask for closure. The wind doesn’t demand apologies. They offer steady ground, a mirror of what it means to belong to yourself.

I started attending to small rituals: stopping to listen to wind through trees, facing the rising or setting sun like medicine, looking up at the canopy noting my breath, tracing a finger along bark. Anchoring in the present instead of chasing repair from the past.

Breath, movement, the steady rhythm of walking spoke to my nervous system in ways forgiveness couldn’t. They taught my body it could trust me again, in small increments.

Reconciliation with them wasn’t necessary. Absolution from myself wasn’t either. What mattered was reconciliation with being present in my body.

Some wounds don’t reconcile. Healing takes a different shape. Less about answers, more about presence. Less about justice, more about noticing sunlight through leaves. Less about someone else changing, more about breathing without shame.

I can’t rewrite the past. But I can stop re-living it. I can return to the moment I’m in.

For once, I can just be.

The Practice

For a long time, being alone felt like punishment.

As a kid, solitude wasn’t chosen. It was imposed. Later, navigating chronic illness, it felt like exile. Friends living their lives while I stayed home with pain. Silence felt like proof I’d been left behind.

I remember one evening on a ridge, wind cutting through my jacket, the valley falling into shadow. No one else for miles. No cell service. Just the sound of my own breath mixing with mountain air.

I sat there longer than I planned. Not because it was peaceful — it wasn’t, not exactly. Something in me kept bracing for the next thing, the next demand, the interruption that didn’t come. I had to keep learning, breath by breath, that no one needed anything from me right now. That I could just be a body on a ridge in the wind.

That’s what the trail gave back: not calm, but permission.

The steady rhythm of footsteps on dirt grounded me when thoughts spun out. Breath fell into cadence with wind through trees, slowing panic I could never out-think. Not because nature fixed anything — but because I could be present with the panic. Watch it rise. Watch it fall. Stay with it while the wind moved through the trees.

When I walk a trail alone, I’m not disconnected. I’m listening more closely. To the birds, to the creek, to the cues of my own body.

Being alone stopped being about being unwanted. It became a practice of being with myself.

Loneliness says: no one is here. Solitude says: everything is here.

Reentry

It took seven and a half years to step back onto a trail.

When I finally did, a year and a half ago, it wasn’t continuation. It was reentry, carrying a body forever altered.

I expected triumph. Instead, I felt grief. My pace was halting. What had once been second nature felt foreign.

When I stopped comparing myself to the old version of me, something shifted. The trail wasn’t asking me to prove anything. It wasn’t keeping score. It simply welcomed me back, at whatever pace I could manage.

Reentry isn’t a single dramatic return. It’s a rhythm. Every time illness knocks me out, every time grief flattens me, there comes a moment when I try again. Sometimes it’s stepping onto a trail. Sometimes it’s sitting at my desk after months of brain fog. Sometimes it’s just making breakfast without resentment.

This week I’m in a flare. Five days down. The pain is excruciating — the same ER-level intensity that’s been constant for ten years.

I’m not trying to stop it. I’m just here with it. Here’s the pain. Here’s the exhaustion. Here’s the morning I wish I hadn’t woken. Here’s the light through the window anyway.

Some weeks I hike five or six miles a day. Other weeks — like this one — I can’t manage the stairs. Nothing I do cures this. What I’ve found, slowly, imperfectly, is a way to be present while my body does what it’s always done: fight itself.

Grief and gratitude don’t take turns. They coexist. Some mornings I wake grateful for breath and movement. Other mornings I wake to pain so severe I wish I hadn’t woken at all.

Both are true. Both are the path.

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Still Rolling Outdoors is a blog of peer reflections on healing and recovery, not to be confused with medical or therapy advice. Your path is uniquely yours. → More on this approach