What The Body Remembers

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 seven and a half years.

I didn't understand then that my body wasn't the enemy, it was the messenger. The nervous system saying: I'm not safe, I need help. Please slow down. Long before we have words for experience, the nervous system keeps score. Registering tone, threat, rupture, silence, carrying those lessons forward.

Trauma isn't 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 thought my body was betraying me, every flare a sabotage, every symptom a rebellion. If I could discipline it into compliance, I'd win. The harder I pushed, the harder it pushed back. I cursed it for being weak.

I treated rest like giving up and pain like moral failure.

Healing didn't come from winning that war. It came from from learning to treat my body not as battlefield, but as companion.

Betrayal We Learn

Nearly all of us, five of six. Subject to the whims and rage of two broken adults, carrying their own pain forward, violently, criminally if I'm honest. CPS wasn't thing in the '60s and '70s.

In the open, loud and visible, often in the front yard for the neighbors to see. For years I didn't understand 2x4s were actually construction materials. Rotory phones, frying pans, irons, a ball of keys, whatever was convenient.

The best we got was a short reprieve with neighbors. They'd take me in, clean me up, and send me on my way before anyone noticed I was gone.

This was the setup. The only path away from escalation was to absorb it without a sound or expression. You learned to contain, suppress, hold pain like deserved it. Like a path to some cinematic cleansing and redemption, but never arrives.

I learned endurance, compliance, over-functioning: 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 and achievement. The more I could absorb, 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. That making peace with the people who caused harm would set me free. But you that's not possible. Turning the demand inward: I forgave myself, the story would stop echoing.

Trauma doesn't wait for apologies. It wires itself into the nervous system and carries the past forward.

Sometimes the person who caused the most lasting harm was me. Pushing, ignoring, abandoning myself for impossible standards.

The forest doesn't ask for closure. The wind doesn't demand apologies. They offer steady ground, a reminder of what it means to belong to yourself. Small rituals took over: listening to wind through trees, facing the rising sun, tracing a finger along bark.

Breath, movement, the rhythm of walking spoke to my nervous system in ways forgiveness couldn't. Teaching my body, in small increments, that it could trust me again.

Reconciliation nor absolution resolves. Some wounds don't reconcile. So healing takes a different shape. Less about answers, more about presence. Can't unwind that clock but 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: imposed as a kid, then an exile during chronic illness, people living their lives while I stayed home.

One evening on a ridge, wind cutting through my jacket, the valley falling into shadow. No one else for miles. No cell service. Just breath mixing with mountain air. I sat there longer than I planned, bracing for a demand that never came, learning breath by breath that no one needed anything from me.

The trail didn't give calm, it gave permission. The rhythm of footsteps grounding me when thoughts spun out, breath falling into cadence with wind through trees. Not because nature fixed anything, but because I was there with it. Watch it rise. Watch it fall.

Walking a trail alone, I'm not disconnected. I'm listening more closely to the birds, the creek, the cues of my own body. Being alone stopped being about being unwanted.

It became a practice of being with myself.

Reentry

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 carrying a body forever altered.

I expected triumph. Instead, I felt grief. What had once been second nature felt foreign. Once I stopped comparing myself to the old version of me, something shifted. The trail wasn't asking for proof. It simply welcomed me back.

I wasn't a dramatic return. It's a rhythm. Every time illness knocks me out, there comes a moment when I try again. Stepping onto a trail, sitting at my desk after months of brain fog, or making breakfast without resentment.

This week I'm in a flare. Five days down, the same ER-level pain 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 light through the window anyway.

Some weeks I hike five or six miles a day. Other weeks I can't manage the stairs. Nothing I do cures this. Slowly and imperfectly, there's way to be present while my body does what it's always done.

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

Both are true. Both are the path.

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *