As I started to peel back the layers of the Self, I began to see the light which was both beautiful and difficult to witness all at once. Being left in the dark and “away from your body” for so long is like coming home after a long time away.
When you flip on the lights, you're likely going to see that some things have been left unattended. Sure, you left things in a good place but there's things you missed and those are the first things we see when we turn on the light.
What I'm trying to say is, there's a different kind of work I was less prepared to do behind the work I'd already been doing. I started to notice that my body could no longer keep my pace. It was my first and last clue that something was out of balance.
It is so odd to know yourself as deeply as you ever have, in a sense, and in other ways feel like your body recognizes you as unfamiliar, hostile and dangerous. For me, that's been my experience, living with an invisible illness. When I was diagnosed, one of my providers asked me if I thought I'd win in a fight with myself. I couldn't get that out of my mind. Because, respectfully, I'm the last person on Earth I'd ever want to fight.
To be honest, I think my body is justified in the actions which are, more accurately, reactions. In the deep moments of reflection, I can see now where I've demanded my body to follow me, no questions asked. I've demanded, shamed, threatened, held hostage, withheld love, food, water, even affection, in order to make it happen.
All the while, promising a worthy outcome. This has been a really critical acknowledgment in my own healing journey: to know that in the spirit of good intentions, good work and even critical work, my body willingly followed until one day it didn't.
In a very low moment during this time and as I continued to conceal how very sick I was, I truly believed I might die. But more frightening than death was the way I would leave things if I did. I had positioned myself to take on so many responsibilities (everything but myself) that I didn't know how it could go on without me.
I’m aware of how that sounds. But I don't mean emotionally. In fact, I was relieved at that thought. I knew that if I died, I had left the world with emotional peace, I had offered safety to those that needed it because I leave nothing on the table. I was absent of regret because I knew all the people I love would know just how much I loved them.
No, it wasn't that.
It was that, purely in the logistical sense, the active, weighted, physical burdens that I'd be leaving my family, my friends and my business; knowing that anyone I loved, even as a collective, couldn't shoulder the weight that I had been carrying and everything I had worked for would cease with me. And that is the hardest thing for me to look at…to see that I cared more about the outcome of my hard work than the body that made it happen.
Even at my lowest point during that time, I was still working. People who are very close to me do not know how truly ill I was and I myself was in such a state of refusal that I neglected to get critical care when I, in hindsight, most certainly needed it.
It was only a few months later, as I experienced prolonged symptoms, that I began to notice certain things. I always accounted for the signals but never stopped to be curious about what they were. So, I labeled them inconvenient, shook off and kept it moving.
What I still grieving about that time, is how perplexed I was by the audacity that my body would show me when I demanded to move. I have so much evidence of how hostile I have been to myself while calling it “hustle” or “heart.”
I was demanding what are arguably the best parts of me to “put them to good use.” To be strong and resilient, to ignore.
Ignore, ignore, ignore.
Ignore what is not serving the purpose of the mission or the task at hand. I really didn't get it. The deepest truth: what was serving the task was my body. My mind, with the ideas, plans and implementations, which cost nothing. My body, to carry out its demands.
That's where the lie has always been. I have always been so reliant on my mind. I've always been perceived and valued for my mind and dismissed, discounted, abused and even tormented in my body. It was something I just couldn't see before but I see it so clearly now.
My body now, sometimes without a shred of mercy, holds me down, face to face with it makes me see that it is an equal partner and potentially, the facilitator of my fate. I can tell you now as I write this that the parts of us that are in charge are filled with grace and mercy. The parts of us that either lead us or end us give so many chances for us to correct our vision until one day, for our own good, we are held down under what feels like the weight of the world, until we submit to see our own worth in our wholeness, not in the parts of us that the world places value in.
After yet another opportunity to slow down due to pleas from my body, I continued to place familiar demands on my body asking myself, “Can we go now?” which swiftly became, “That's enough rest” which then evolved to “I will rest later, there's work to do.” I didn't just implement this in one area of my life. I implemented it everywhere. It had become who I was…Again.
I remember the first time I made figurative eye contact with my own body's power over me. The best way I know how to describe that feeling is as if I had a scope pointed at me. As if I knew I had been clocked. It was swift and like a gunshot. One of my first and most debilitating flares came when I needed more speed, more power and more energy and when I demanded it, as I had so many other times before, I came up with nothing. I called and I did not come.
Not again, I thought. I was annoyed… again…at how my body wouldn't budge. I started to recognize that I would need to fix this again. I see now that underneath that annoyance was an incredibly shaking fear that I would learn what I had already known: that my body was keeping a debt that I would have to pay. And the long and short of it is, I learned that I have such a debt to self that I may be spending the rest of my life paying it.
I have been humbled into servitude towards my own body. I plead daily for my body to view me as the friends we once were as opposed to the enemy that I became.
I made a critical error in my calculations and forgot to account for myself in the way I accounted for everything and everyone else. I am incurably optimistic right now as I approach what might just be the hardest and deepest work I've ever had to do.
I am now seated, quiet and ready to listen to my body. I think one of the most interesting things I've learned so far is how unbelievably flexible the consequences of our actions are. I spent so much time, and even went through the trouble of engraving the outcome into my personality when the truth is, the outcome is actually the will of our alignment and that center point between our mind and body. I've “accomplished so much at such a young age* also means I've lived a whole lifetime before I've ever really started living my life.
My hope is that someone will read this and pause the way I didn't. Maybe they will recognize that their body calls the shots; that their mind makes for a better follower. The body most certainly does keep a score.
- Anonymous