Last week I saw a physical therapist about my sciatica. It’s been going on for about two years, travelling from my butt through the back of the thigh and into my heel. It’s worse in the mornings and also at night when I’m trying to sleep. The PT asked me to rate the pain out of ten.

I said six.

She stopped writing and looked at me and said she couldn’t believe I’d been walking around like that. And what I felt, immediately, was embarrassment.

Somebody told me I’d been in significant pain for a long time and my response was shame.

I’ve been thinking about this all week, because six is not the number I’d been operating on. She kept looking at me and I could feel myself starting to squirm in my seat. I even said to her you’re making me feel bad. Her response was that she just said she doesn’t know how someone has been walking around for so long in this much pain. I then said I’m an over-achiever and over-functioner, and well, I just block it out. It’s there in the back of my mind, like I can feel the pain but I ignore it. We then talked about child birthing stories, totally unrelated but I was trying to give reference to my pain tolerance of delivering babies without any meds (as a lot of women do).

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I’ve spent two years learning about the nervous system and wanting to heal my own. I even collected a few certifications along the way. I know why I am the way I am and for the longest time just brushed it off as such. I see patterns in people and notice how things get filed away just because that’s life, rather than looking at the event that happened when you were younger.

I filed a six for two years.

The PT had me lie on my front and do a set of press-ups, and asked me to give a new score. After three rounds of exercises, my pain had dropped to a one. At which point she explained the method behind it with a demonstration from her handy dandy skeleton. She took the time to explain that I have a bulging disc. Nobody has done this in all the years I’ve had this off and on. I’m going to be honest, I was freaking out when I heard it. I asked if I’d need surgery. She said no but because it’s been going on so long I’ll have to manage it, and she can teach me how, but it isn’t a big deal. She also loaned me a book to read before our next session.

While we were talking, a couple of memories surfaced, and I think one of them is relevant.

I’ve had a tight lower back since I was sixteen.

I was moving a piece of furniture for my mum. I remember this antique chest of drawers that needed to go into another room, and my dad was away working. I didn’t think anything of it. It was still loaded with clothes and, well, any normal person, ahem, would have emptied it. Suffice to say I grabbed hold at the bottom of the drawers and started tugging. At that point something just shifted in my back. It hurt. A lot.

I finished moving it and didn’t tell anyone about the pain I was in. I wasn’t scared about what my mum would say or do, by that I mean I didn’t think I’d get in trouble. I’d learned from an early age to not make a fuss and handle things myself, it was just how I got conditioned and didn’t think anything of it. So I put a hand on my back, had a soak in the bathtub that night, and just got on with whatever came next.

From that point I’ve had a tight lower back and I just assumed it was a fact about my body. I didn’t make the correlation until recently. If it ever came up in conversation, like people with bad knees, like yeah, I have a tight back. It’s just part of who I am.

My first episode was in my late twenties when I was working in London. I had a desk job and it was a work hard, play hard environment. I can’t remember exactly what triggered it, but I know it was painful, running all down my leg, and I didn’t make the connection to what happened when I was sixteen. My parents were visiting at the time and I remember my dad telling me to sit on a tennis ball. It worked, and that was the end of it.

This current bout I’ve been mentally blocking out. I lift weights five to six days a week and I’m adding load because of the program I follow. I’ve been modifying without really registering that I’ve been doing that.

Your mind will justify what’s happened to you. Your body remembers every single event you’ve been through.

You can call it age, or life. But having lived through releasing some of my own trauma, I don’t believe that anymore.

We get conditioned by our parents, and we’re meant to be. They’re our role models. They teach us right from wrong based on what they lived through, and they pass it down to us without meaning to, and mostly it keeps us safe.

The further down this I go, the more I think the work is finding your way back to who you were before all of it.

I notice I opened this letter by telling you there are things I can’t talk about yet.

What have you decided isn’t worth mentioning?

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Except the day after a real session, apparently I do all of those things.

Inside it feels like stagnation, not depression or sadness. It’s not a mood I can name and work with., it’s just a flatness. A not-wanting-to-do-anything-except-exist. The part of me that is always useful, always moving, always finding the next thing has just gone quiet. And the body that was bracing and burning and flushing and crying yesterday is asking for absolutely nothing today except to be left alone.

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Yesterday’s session was the kind that actually touches something. The kind where the nervous system gets asked to go somewhere it has been very carefully not going, where real work happens underneath the surface of whatever you think you arrived to talk about.

There’s a part of me, the pragmatist, the one that just wants to get on with it, that kept butting in during the session. Every time we got close to something, my practitioner had to ask her to step back and give it some space, and she would, genuinely, for about five minutes. And then she’d be back. Pushing and ready to just rip the bandaid off, let’s go, we know what’s in there, what are we waiting for. We had to keep asking her to step aside, gently, until it got to the point of being almost funny, this part of me is so convinced that the fastest route through is the best one, completely uninterested in the idea that the system might need a different kind of approach.

So we did some resourcing instead. My practitioner asked me to find a place, real or imagined, where I felt calm and grounded and safe. What came up immediately was a tropical beach. With pure white sands, palm trees, and the ocean with that particular shade of turquoise that doesn't look real until you're standing in front of it. I could feel the sand under my feet, hear the water lapping gently against the shore, and something in my body that had been braced for the whole session started to soften just from being there in my mind. And when I looked down the beach I saw someone walking toward me.

It was me.

Not a younger version, or a wounded part but me, but capital-S me. Self. Confident in a way that had nothing to do with performance, beautiful in a way that was just natural and quiet, radiating something I can only describe as calm and compassion and complete lack of apology for existing. I was struck by her. By me. We met on the beach and I told her I’d been trying to find her and didn’t understand where she’d been, and she said she’d been there the whole time. She held me. I cried. She told me it was okay, that I wasn’t alone, that everything in the box would still be there when I was ready, that scared was allowed.

When she went to leave I told her I didn’t want her to go, and she told me she never leaves. That I just have to get quiet enough to find her. And she gave me something before she left, a light, small and bright, like something out of a fairytale, and she said it was for all the parts of me, for the darkness in the box, because there is light in each of us even when we can’t feel it.

I know how that sounds. I'm a practitioner and it still surprises me every time. The thing about resourcing is you don't direct it, you just ask the mind to find something and then get out of the way. Whatever comes up is what the system needed, not what you would have chosen.

That’s what happened in my session. And the day after, my body that did all of that just wants to exist without being asked for anything.

The system doesn’t snap back after something real moves through it. It reorganises, slowly and without announcing itself, which is why the day after looks so much like nothing is happening when underneath everything is still moving. The pragmatist part that was so ready to rip the bandaid off has nothing to do today. The part that held the container needs to rest. All of it happens quietly beneath the surface of a day that looks from the outside like someone who just can’t be bothered.

The flatness feels like losing a day and the stagnation feels like regression. And because bed rotting is so far from my baseline it feels alarming, like something went wrong, like I should be integrating more productively somehow.

The stagnation is the integration. They’re the same thing. And the nervous system called in sick today, and that’s the most honest thing it could have done.

What came up was a box. It was huge, and felt like it was carrying so much darkness inside. It was packed full of everything that didn’t get to be felt when it happened. The packing started early - dissociation at four years old is the body’s way of surviving what it can’t process, of putting the unbearable somewhere it won’t interfere with getting through the day. By the time I was old enough to have other tools, I already knew how to not feel things. Drinking just gave that an adult form. Living in a cultural norm of using alcohol to take the edge off what was sitting too close to the surface. It worked the way numbing always works, which is to say it worked until it didn’t, and everything it was holding went into the box anyway.

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I didn’t open the box in the session. I just got close to it. And the moment I did my stomach braced, there was a flush of energy up my spine, my jaw felt like it was on fire. Tears rolled down my face before I’d even decided to cry. And somewhere in all of it I heard, or felt, it’s hard to separate the two, something that landed as too much. Whether that was the box saying this is too much, or me saying I can’t do this yet, I still don’t know. But my jaw hurt so much I couldn’t ignore it. The body was telling me something was in there that it had been working very hard to keep closed.

That’s not healing, it’s contact. The body locating something it has been keeping at a safe distance for a very long time, and responding to the proximity before the mind has formed a single thought about what to do with it. You can’t heal what you can’t find. And finding it, really finding it, in the body rather than just knowing it’s there intellectually, feels nothing like the healing content suggested it would. It feels like a burning jaw and tears you didn’t decide to cry and something that says too much before you’ve even started.

Healing has become a content category. Nervous system regulation shows up in weight loss programs now. Somatic cues get woven into writing coach content. Trauma-informed language appears in places that have nothing to do with trauma work, used as aesthetic, as credibility, as a way of signalling that someone gets it. Some of it is genuinely useful, borrowed carefully from people who actually understand what they’re working with. But a lot of it is the vocabulary without the substance, and when you’ve been trying to heal for years, consuming that content can feel like being handed a map to a place that doesn’t exist. You follow the directions and still end up nowhere different.

The missing piece isn’t another technique or a modality you haven’t found yet. It’s something more uncomfortable than that.

Insight is not the same as healing, and this is the thing that doesn’t get said clearly enough. You can understand your patterns completely, see exactly how the adaptation formed, name the wound, trace it back to the moment it started, and still find yourself living inside it. The thinking brain can hold all of that knowledge and the body can go right on doing what it learned to do before you had language for any of it, because the pattern isn’t stored in the part of you that understands things. It’s stored in the part of you that learned to survive.

I know this from the inside. I have certifications in this work. I’ve sat with my own nervous system in sessions that went places I didn’t expect, traced tensions in my body back decades, felt what body memory actually is rather than just reading about it. And I am still, right now, in patterns I can name and describe and understand completely. Still finding new rooms in the same house.

That’s not a confession of failure. It’s what healing actually looks like from the inside, not a before and after, or a place you reach where the work is done. It’s a practice of continuing to show up for the parts of you that are still running old programs, one session at a time, one noticed moment at a time.

So if the healing didn’t work, it might be that you’re measuring it against an impossible standard, the idea that healed means finished, resolved, and that the pattern is gone. It isn’t gone. Healing means the pattern has less grip, means you catch it sooner, means the jaw clenches and you notice it now instead of carrying it for another decade without knowing why. Or maybe insight-based work changed what you know, but the body wasn’t included in the conversation, and those aren’t the same thing and they don’t substitute for each other. The nervous system doesn’t heal in isolation, it heals in the presence of another regulated nervous system.

Or maybe the healing is working and it just doesn’t look like what you were promised.

This is experiential work. You can read about it, understand it intellectually, follow along with someone describing what happens in a session, and still have no idea what it actually is until you’re in it. Until you’re sitting with a sensation in your jaw and following it somewhere you didn’t expect to go. Until something in the body releases that the mind has been explaining for years without moving an inch.

When you try to describe a session to someone who hasn’t done this work, you watch their face go politely blank. Not because they don’t care, but because the words don’t carry it. The experience is the only container that holds it. That’s why the content isn’t enough, however good it is. That’s why reading about somatic cues in a weight loss program gives you the map but not the territory. The territory is in the body, and the body only learns it one session at a time.

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I’m still in it. That’s the part that stayed with me after I switched it off.

Not because nothing has changed - a lot has changed, the self-awareness alone is unrecognizable from where I started. But the loop itself, the particular pattern that recording was circling, is still here. Living the same version of a day I’ve already lived more times than I can count. And the strangest part isn’t the sameness, it’s that I can see it clearly now, name it, trace it all the way back to where it started, and still find myself standing in the middle of it on a Tuesday wondering why nothing has moved.

That gap between understanding a pattern and actually breaking one is where most people spend years without anyone telling them it’s supposed to be this hard.

The pattern isn’t in the thinking brain. It’s in the body, stored there long before you had language for what was happening, as a survival response, as the shape you learned to make yourself into so the people around you would stay, or calm down, or stop being unpredictable. And the body doesn’t update that just because the mind has caught up. You can understand exactly why you do something, trace it back to its origin, hold the whole map of it in your head, and still find your nervous system running the same program it always has. Because the program was never about understanding. It was about staying safe. And safe, even when it’s miserable, feels known. And known feels safer than whatever comes next.

That’s why you can know and still not move. The knowing lives in one place and the pattern lives somewhere else entirely.

I’ve been sitting with this in a very unacademic way lately. In the question that keeps surfacing underneath the routine, what is this actually for. In the recognition that I can teach this work and write about it, hold the theory of it, and still wake up in the same loop I was circling years ago when I made that recording without knowing what I was naming.

That’s humbling in a way I didn’t expect. And it’s also, I think, the most honest thing I can tell you about what this work actually looks like from the inside. It’s not a straight line. It’s not a before and after and it doesn’t resolve because you understand it. It loosens, slowly, through the body being included in the conversation, through following the sensation instead of explaining it, staying with the discomfort long enough to find out what it’s protecting. Those slow accumulation of moments where the automatic response pauses just long enough for something else to become possible.

That’s not the version that gets sold in eight-week programs but it’s the real one.

If you recognize this, the understanding without the moving, the same Tuesday arriving again just know you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just further into it than the map suggested you’d be by now. The loop doesn’t break all at once. It loosens one noticed moment at a time.

What’s the pattern you understand completely and still can’t stop?

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I arrived with something around clarity. A decision I’ve been sitting with, the relief of it, and underneath the relief a tension I couldn’t explain. I felt it in my jaw, a tight burning sensation, like something clamping down. My practitioner asked me to stay with the sensation and get curious about it.

My jaw took me back 41 years.

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I was 10 years old, and he was my first proper boyfriend, the kind where you sit at the back of the bus on school trips and have kissing competitions alongside your friends. The kind that feels entirely serious because at 10 it is entirely serious, before you’ve learned to be guarded with your heart.

I used to cut out the Love Is... comics from the newspaper. Those little hand-drawn figures, earnest and unguarded, with their captions about what love looks like in small moments. I gave them to him every day, for weeks. Thirty small offerings from a 10-year-old who didn’t yet know there was any other way to love than completely.

He broke up with me and I ended up being home sick for a week, but I wasn’t really sick, I was heartbroken. When I came back to school and lifted my desk lid I found every single Love Is... paper that I’d given him, ripped and crumpled up inside it. Thirty days of showing up with my whole heart, screwed up and returned in one go.

The whole class was watching. The teacher was watching. It felt like time stopped and all eyes were on me and it went deathly quiet. And something in that moment made a decision that I have been living by ever since. Hold back the tears. My jaw clamped down to stop them from falling and to get through it alone.

That’s what my jaw has been doing since I was 10 years old.

In the session my practitioner guided me back into the memory as a witness. To be with my younger self the way nobody was at the time. I sat with her in the memory, crouched down beside her, and I let her feel what she hadn’t been allowed to feel in front of all those eyes. The tears that the jaw had been holding back for four decades. She cried, and I stayed with her, and it was the strangest and most tender thing, being both the child and the adult at the same time.

At some point I asked myself, in the memory, whether I should tell my mum. And when I sat with why I was even asking that, what came back was the fear underneath it. We’d already moved schools once because I’d been unhappy at the previous school. If I told her this happened, my brain thought we’d move again. So I’d decided in that moment to keep it all locked up. Because telling the truth felt like it came with a cost I wasn’t willing to pay.

The thinking mind can understand your patterns, trace the logic of how you got here, name every coping mechanism with precision, and still not move the thing that needs moving. Because the thing that needs moving isn’t a thought. It’s a body memory. A decision made before you had words for it, held in muscle and tissue, quietly running the show decades later.

That part never got the update. It’s been showing up ever since, clamping things down, keeping it together, making itself so independent it would never have to risk being that exposed again.

What shifts in a session like this isn’t the memory. You can’t change what happened. What shifts is the aloneness of it. Going back not to re-experience it but to bring a witness this time. To let the part of you that had to hold it together finally not hold it together, because someone is there. Even if that someone is you, now, going back.

She wanted to cry. She’d been waiting 41 years to cry about it.

And somewhere in the body, something released. In a way that was enough to feel the difference between held and held less tightly. Enough to understand that the jaw is a protector who learned its job very young and has been faithful to it ever since.

This is why the body is the way in. Not because the thinking mind isn’t useful, but because it can’t reach what’s been stored below the level of thought. And when you learn to follow what the body is telling you, it will take you somewhere the mind never could.

You just have to be willing to stay with the jaw long enough to find out what it knows.

I said it out loud to myself in the car, be present, everything else can wait.

My mother never came to these things. Not once. Not field day or any of the events where you find yourself scanning the crowd for the face that’s looking back for yours. She didn’t come, and because children are adaptive in ways we sometimes mistake for resilience, I stopped scanning. I stopped expecting and called it fine. The body kept the record anyway. It always does. So when my daughter asked me twice and my body resisted twice, that was history in the tissue, running its familiar program because it doesn’t know yet that the thing being offered now is different from the thing that never came then.

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The night before, I’d been watching a talk by Dr. Alan Fogel, psychologist, somatic practitioner, author, as part of a summit on embodied self-awareness. He talked about three states we move between, and I went to sleep turning them over.

Dysregulation is the stuck place. The state you can’t think your way out of, where the nervous system is running the show without your input. Fight, flight, or the freeze that gets mistaken for calm, and the defining feature of it is that it feels permanent. Like it will never end.

Modulation is where most of us live. We can name what we’re feeling, take a break, go for a walk, do the yoga class. We’re functional, even resilient. But the breaks are brief and the mind keeps spinning underneath, still managing, still task-focused, still running the quiet background process of am I doing this right. Fogel’s honest about this: the yoga class where part of you is wondering if your pose looks right is modulation. The walk where your mind is still cycling through the morning is modulation. It’s not nothing, and it’s necessary, but it’s not the whole story.

Restoration is different in kind, not just degree. You cannot plan it, schedule it, or think your way into it, and Fogel is clear about this in a way that stopped me, the moment you register I’m in a restorative state right now, you’ve already left it. You’re back in modulation, making sense of the experience instead of being inside it. Restoration is what happens when your attention stops being directed by you and starts being called somewhere. You fall into it rather than arriving there by effort.

When I got there I found my son first, wandering near the edges of the field collecting leaves and twigs, just being a boy, completely in his own world. Then I went looking for my daughter because she’d asked for me there specifically, and I found her class just as the third graders were setting up for tug-of-war.

And something happened that I didn’t manufacture and didn’t analyze until later, my face was smiling. Genuinely, in a way it hasn’t for a while. And then full body goosebumps, then something in my chest, around my heart, expanded. I didn’t think about it, I just felt it, or became aware of it, which is a different thing. I wasn’t watching myself have an experience. I was just there.

Driving over I’d told myself to be present. Which, looking at it through Fogel’s framework now, was a modulation move, I was directing my own attention, managing the experience into something intentional. But standing on that field watching a class of eight-year-olds throw everything they had into a rope, something shifted into a different gear. I honestly don’t know if it was restoration or if it was modulation that finally stopped gripping. Fogel would probably say that if I’m asking, I was thinking, and if I was thinking, I wasn’t fully in it. But I also didn’t analyze it until after, in the moment I was just there, face warm, chest open, with goosebumps that I didn’t summon.

Maybe that’s what the edge of restoration feels like. Not a state you achieve but more like something you stop interrupting.

What the framework makes visible that the experience alone couldn’t is the arc of how I got there. The resistance the day before, the shame about the resistance, the wanting to find the exit, that was dysregulation, old history doing what old history does. The decision to go anyway, naming what I felt in the car, giving myself the instruction to be present, that was modulation. Necessary, useful, and the bridge. And then the field, with the children, the rope, and my son’s pockets full of leaves somewhere behind me. My daughter somewhere in that crowd who’d asked for me twice, and something in the body finally stopped managing and just received it.

Fogel said we can’t jump from dysregulation into restoration. Modulation is the transitional place. You name the feeling, you make the decision, you show up, and then if you stop grading your own stillness long enough, something else becomes possible - it’s not guaranteed.

I stood on that field for an hour. My daughter found me eventually, checked that I was there, and went back to her friends, which is exactly what she needed to do, and exactly what I needed to see. She didn’t need a performance of mothering. She needed me to actually be there, and somewhere underneath the years of not knowing how to receive ordinary moments, I was.

Where in your life are you modulating, coping, managing, taking the right kind of break, and quietly calling it restored? What would it feel like to stop directing the experience and find out what the body does on its own? Not the thought you have about the feeling. The feeling itself, before you’ve made sense of it. That’s the place worth finding. And you probably can’t get there by trying. But you can stop interrupting it, and that might be enough.

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The three-state framework in this piece draws on the work of Dr. Alan Fogel, Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Utah and Rosen Method practitioner. If you want to go deeper into the research, his paper Three States of Embodied Self-Awareness is worth the read.

You were taught that attraction is about how someone looks. Symmetry, height, body type, the list of features that make someone objectively attractive, as if attraction were a ranking system the body agrees to follow. It isn’t. Attraction is what your nervous system does in someone’s presence.

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The first three seconds are physical and that part is real, pheromones, voice pitch, the way someone moves through a room. Some bodies register that hit and some don’t, and you can’t argue your body into something it didn’t feel. That part is wired in and largely outside of choice. But it’s the opening pitch. It is not the reason anyone stays.

Sustained attraction, the kind that lasts past the first chapter is almost entirely about what your body does when this person is near you. Do you expand or contract when they walk into the room? Does your breath get deeper or shallower? Do you feel more like yourself in their presence, or less? Those are the real answers. Not their face but the nervous system response.

This is why someone can become more attractive the longer you know them, and someone else can become less. The face hasn’t changed. The body’s response has. Resonance built, or eroded, over time.

Beauty is the door. Resonance is the room.

There’s a darker version of this that doesn’t get named often enough. You can be drawn to someone in a way that looks like attraction but is actually nervous system addiction. The hit of warmth from someone usually cold, that feeling gets mistaken for passion.

Real attraction is baseline elevated. Addiction is relief from withdrawal.

The difference is what your body does between the moments of contact. With real attraction the baseline expands, life feels bigger, you feel more like yourself, the world has more color even when they aren’t there. With addiction the baseline contracts, life feels smaller, anxious, organized around the next contact, dimmer in their absence.

The hardest part is that if your nervous system learned love through unpredictability, through waiting and the relief of being chosen by someone who usually doesn’t, then real attraction can feel boring at first. Stable feels flat. Safe feels like the absence of feeling. The nervous system raised on contrast will mistake steadiness for nothing happening. And it changes, slowly, as the system learns that safety is allowed to feel good.

Most people confuse the relief of finally getting a small crumb of warmth for chemistry.

So when you find yourself questioning what you feel, start lower than the question of whether someone is attractive. Start with what your body actually does in their presence. Does it lean in or brace. Does it want more of this person, or does it want a different room.

Bodies don’t lie about this. They might be slow to admit it. They might be trained out of registering it. But the data is there, underneath the story you’ve been telling yourself about the face.

The question of who to want is, in the end, a question of who your nervous system can be itself around.

Not at the end, when there was finally a word for what was happening and a process to go through and people who knew what to say. Before that. In the ordinary Monday evenings when I could feel the distance and couldn’t name it yet. In the moments I reached for something and found nothing there. It was a slow, quiet understanding that the life I’d thought I was building wasn’t what I’d thought it was.

That grief didn’t get a funeral. There was no moment where anyone said I’m sorry for your loss, because the loss hadn’t officially happened yet. So I did what you do and I kept going and kept functioning. I kept being the person who had it together.

And I carried it. For years after, I was still carrying it. Not consciously but in the way my body tensed at certain things. The way certain conversations would hit somewhere deep and I couldn’t explain why. The way I’d find myself flooded by something that seemed disproportionate to whatever had just happened, until I understood that I wasn’t responding to now. I was responding to then. To the grief that never got to move.

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Some wounds don’t heal because they haven’t been grieved. They haven’t been felt or named and allowed to moved through.

And grief doesn’t only come for death. Some of the deepest grief comes from what never even happened, what was promised and didn’t arrive, what you needed and didn’t get, what you held on to long after it was already gone.

The parent who couldn't love you the way you needed. The childhood spent surviving instead of living. The years given to something already over. The version of you who was never chosen.

Nobody holds a service for any of that. Nobody sends flowers. So your body holds it instead, waiting for the moment it’s finally safe to put it down.

Unprocessed grief hides well.

It hides behind your anger. The disproportionate reaction, the flash of fury at something small that’s actually fury at something enormous and old. It disguises itself as anxiety, as the low-level hum of dread that has no clear source. It shows up as fatigue you can’t shake and sadness you can’t name and the strange hollow feeling of having done everything right and still feeling like something is missing.

They never chose me. I never got to be a child. No one protected me. I stayed too long in something that was already gone.

This is grief of emotional rupture, not dramatic trauma. With no single event or obvious villain. Just a slow accumulation of moments where something that should have been there wasn’t, and you kept going anyway, and your body kept score.

Unprocessed grief doesn’t always look like crying. It looks like overthinking, overexplaining, overachieving. It looks like staying busy because if you slow down something might catch up with you. It looks like going numb where you should feel angry, or flooding at the smallest things, or self-blame that feels safer than the devastation of admitting that someone didn’t show up, that you weren’t protected, that the support wasn’t there.

Blame feels safer than grief. At least blame gives you something to do.

Until it doesn’t.

I’m not writing this from the other side of it. I’m writing it from somewhere in the middle, where I’ve done enough of this work to know that the grief is there, and enough to know that I haven’t finished moving through it.

What I know is that when I’ve tried to skip this part - when I’ve gone straight to understanding, to reframing, to the next piece of work, something stays incomplete. A tightness that doesn’t release. A place that knows it hasn’t been heard yet.

Grief doesn’t want to break you, it wants to move through you. But only when you stop long enough to let it.

You don’t have to cry on cue or perform devastation. You don’t have to prove your pain was bad enough to deserve to be felt.

You just need somewhere the ache is allowed to exist.

That’s where it starts to move.

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She said she felt unwell. Ached everywhere from her arms to her legs… everywhere. My first instinct was: is she getting sick? My 11 year old just got over flu and mum-radar doesn’t switch off just because one child has recovered. I was already on alert.

But then I thought about what she’d actually been doing earlier in the week.

She’d been riding bareback.

No saddle. No structure, no support, no mechanical buffer between her body and every single stride that horse took. Every movement went straight through her core, her inner thighs, her arms bracing and holding, her lower back absorbing the constant subtle shifts in balance. Bareback riding is a full body stability workout that nobody warned you was a full body stability workout. You just get on the horse and your whole system quietly goes to work.

So when she said she ached everywhere, she wasn’t getting sick. She was post-bareback. And I knew that immediately. I could read it.

It’s a half day at school. I’d already committed with the instructor. Sometimes we do the thing anyway.

Before we left, I suggested foam rolling. Her hip flexors, her quads, her IT band, her inner thighs, all the places that take a beating in the saddle, amplified tenfold when there is no saddle. It made complete sense. It was the most practical thing I could offer her.

Her response: “I’m not doing any of your weird stuff.”

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I want to sit with that for a second before I get to the foam rolling, because something cracked open when she said it.

Not because she was rude, she’s a teenager, this is the job. But because your weird stuff told me she’s been watching me. Categorising me. Building a folder in her head labelled Mum’s Weird Stuff and filing things in it. Somatic work. Body awareness. Knowing what the body needs and actually doing something about it.

I’ve been called weird before. Not just by her.

There’s a script most people are running. Get to a certain age, hit a certain milestone, perform the next expected thing. And somewhere inside that script, being awake to your body - knowing what it needs, listening to it, responding to it - reads as excessive. Strange. Odd even.

I spent years being the easy one. The one who managed everything quietly, who didn’t make waves, who kept the whole operation running without anyone having to think about it. And now I’m finally being myself, fully, out loud, and I’m getting called weird for it.

That stings. I won’t pretend it doesn’t.

But being called weird by someone still inside the matrix means you’ve left it. And that’s information worth sitting with.

So. Foam rolling.

Can kids do it? Yes. Absolutely yes.

Foam rolling applies gentle sustained pressure to the fascia and muscle - releasing tension, improving circulation, reducing soreness. Physios use it. Athletic coaches use it. Sports programmes for young athletes include it routinely. Nothing exotic or dangerous about it.

Here’s what was probably happening in my daughter’s body after bareback riding, and why she ached everywhere and meant it.

Her hip flexors were short and tight. Sitting in the saddle keeps the hip in a flexed position for extended periods. When you get off, those muscles don’t just spring back to neutral, they stay pulled, and that contributes to the lower back ache, that heavy-legged dragging feeling that gets labelled as laziness. Bareback amplifies this because there are no stirrups taking any weight. The hip flexors work the entire time just to keep your seat.

Her IT band and outer thighs took friction and compression from gripping. That lateral tightness can pull on the knee, create a nagging ache down the outside of the leg, make walking feel stiff.

Her quads and inner thighs had been working isometrically the whole ride, holding, stabilizing, gripping. Not a full range of motion workout. A sustained clenching one. That leaves a particular kind of deep soreness that rolling helps move through.

And her arms and upper back (this is the bareback detail people miss) had been actively stabilizing against an unpredictable moving surface the entire time. Not gripping reins in a relaxed way. Bracing. That’s a different kind of fatigue. That’s why she said everywhere. She meant it.

She ached everywhere because her whole body had been working. A few minutes on a foam roller, nothing elaborate, nothing painful, just slow steady pressure on those areas, would have helped her feel better faster. That’s just knowing how the body works.

She didn’t foam roll.

She went to horse riding anyway, because sometimes we do the thing.

And I held the tears that wanted to come in the car on the way to orthodontics afterward, not about the horse riding, not really. About something older and more tender than that. The part of me that is finally being real and still, somehow, can’t quite land with the people closest to me.

But I know what I know. I know what the body needs. I know why it works. And calling something weird doesn’t make it wrong.

Eventually, maybe not today, maybe not for years, she’ll reach for this knowledge too.

I’ll leave it right here for when she does.

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“I’m fine, thanks. You?”

It came out before I’d even checked. Automatic reflex, the same way I’d swat a fly. The same way I respond to anyone who asks anything that doesn’t actually require a real answer.

And then, half a second later, I felt it. The lie. Not a big dramatic lie, just a small one. The kind I tell so often I don’t even register them anymore.

I started arguing with myself. Why did you say that. You’re not fine. Why didn’t you tell her you’re not fine.

And then the answer, just as fast: because she doesn’t actually want to know. She’s just asking. That’s what people do.

But underneath that, the truer thing: I do this everywhere. With everyone. All the time. It’s a survival skill I learned a long time ago and have been quietly perfecting ever since.

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Self-abandonment doesn’t always look dramatic. It’s not always the big sacrifice or the relationship you stayed in too long. Sometimes it looks like I’m fine when you’re not. It’s not a big deal when it is. I don’t want to make a scene when something really needs to be named.

It looks like laughing at a joke that made your stomach drop. Staying in a room your body is begging you to leave. Apologising for a boundary you just set. Going quiet instead of saying the true thing.

I used to think this was just politeness, a social skill.

It took me a long time to understand it as something I learned before I had words for it. That speaking up cost something, that needing things was inconvenient, that the safest version of me was the quietest one.

Your nervous system remembers every time you said something real and got punished for it. Every time you cried and were ignored. Every time you wanted something and were told it was too much.

So when that flicker rises — the I’m not actually fine — your body doesn’t say stay and feel it. It says run, numb, fawn, freeze, disappear. Get out before it costs you something.

Staying goes against everything survival taught you. That’s why it’s hard. That’s why it doesn’t feel like a choice most of the time, because it feels like gravity, like the only direction available.

Staying doesn’t mean you get it right every time. It means you don’t ghost yourself when you get it messy.

It looks like noticing you said I’m fine when you weren’t, and not punishing yourself for it. Just clocking it. Oh. I left. There I went again.

Sometimes that noticing is all you can do that day. That’s enough. That is the practice. Not perfection, just the moment of coming back.

In the body, staying doesn’t feel calm. It feels true.

Heat rising in your throat before you say something real. Shakiness in your belly while you hold a line. An ache in your chest when you don’t apologise for taking up space. A slow breath that actually lands after years of shallow ones.

It won’t feel peaceful. It’ll feel like contact. Like you’re finally with yourself instead of orbiting your own life from somewhere just outside it.

It starts smaller than you think.

Not with the big confrontation. Not with the relationship-changing conversation. Just with the moment someone asks how you are and you actually pause before you answer.

You might still say I’m fine and that’s okay. The pause is the thing. The pause means you noticed. The pause is the first thing that wasn’t automatic.

You’ll know you’re leaving yourself when you start jumping to logic the second an emotion rises. When you self-correct your tone or your opinion mid-sentence. When you feel a flood of shame for having a need. When you’re suddenly managing someone else’s feelings instead of your own.

When you notice it, don’t ask what’s wrong with me.

Ask where did I just go.

That question is the return.

I still leaving myself sometimes. Probably daily. With colleagues. With strangers. With my own body when it tries to tell me something I’m not ready to hear.

But I’m noticing it now. That’s new.

And every time I notice, I come back a little faster than the time before. Not because I’ve mastered anything but, because I’ve just done it enough times that the distance between leaving and noticing is getting shorter.

Staying isn’t something you achieve. It’s something you choose, again and again, in ordinary moments with ordinary people who ask how you are on a Tuesday and don’t really want to know.

Some days I manage thirty seconds of it. Some days I forget for a week.

But I keep coming back. And that, I think, is the whole thing.

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It’s been unseasonably hot here on the Outer Banks—the kind of March heat that doesn’t make sense but you don’t question it, you just open the back door and let the kids loose. So they were in the pool. My son on a float, my daughter swimming underneath him, tickling his feet. Him giggling the way only an eight year old boy can giggle—full body, no self-consciousness, pure stupid joy.

They were having races. I had to time them. “Mum, count how long it takes me to get from this side to the other side!” So I counted. She’d swim. He’d swim. They’d argue about who was faster. They’d do it again.

They went up and down the slide. They sent toys down the slide. He put the pool float under the slide and tried to launch himself off it. I said, “Be careful, dude. I don’t want that thing flying out from under you and you cracking your head open.”

He said, “It’s fine, Mum. It’s fun. Watch.”

And he did it. And the whole trajectory of his body wasn’t anything like what I’d pictured. It was fine. It was just a kid going down a slide onto a float at the bottom.

And something in me went: oh, ok.

I need to tell you what that “oh, ok” means, because it doesn’t sound like anything. It sounds like a woman watching her kids in a pool. It sounds ordinary. But for me, it was not ordinary.

I have spent years— not months, years—living in a body that was convinced my children were about to get hurt. Not in a rational, sensible-precaution way. In a tight-chest, scanning-for-danger, heart-racing, playing-out-the-injury-before-it-happens way. The kind of vigilance that looks like good parenting from the outside but feels like a war zone on the inside.

I used to not want to be out there at all. I’d think: they’re going to get hurt and I can’t watch that happen. So I’d go inside. Or I’d stay but grip the chair, every muscle ready to jump, running worst-case scenarios while they splashed and laughed and had no idea their mum was drowning three metres away in broad daylight.

That’s hypervigilance. That’s a nervous system that learned, a long time ago, that the worst thing can happen—because it did happen—and now it never stops bracing for the next one.

Yesterday I was sat in a chair with my feet tucked underneath because I didn’t want them to get wet. I’m always cold. The pool was too cold for me. I wasn’t in it. I was just there. Watching.

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My daughter kept checking. “Are you going inside?” Not because she wanted me to leave. Because she wanted to make sure I was staying. I changed position and she looked over. I moved my feet and she looked over. She wanted me in that chair.

I said no, I’m just moving because I don’t want wet feet. She went back to playing. She came back and checked again. Then I had to go inside to make dinner and she was so disappointed— but also starving. The kind of eleven-year-old dilemma where swimming and eating are both urgent and she can’t believe the world is making her choose.

And in the middle of all that—the checking, the counting, the slide, the float, the races—I was calm. Not performing calm. Not masking. Actually calm. My heart wasn’t racing. My body wasn’t bracing. I watched my son launch himself down a slide on a pool float and I said be careful and then I watched him do it anyway and the world didn’t end and my body knew it before my brain caught up.

Oh, ok.

Here’s why this matters beyond my backyard.

Last week I wrote about growing up in a house where everything looked fine but nothing was felt. Where my dad worked away and my mum performed for attention and I learned to be the easy kid who didn’t need anything. Where the rule was: don’t make a fuss, don’t take up space, don’t let anyone see the cracks.

That childhood taught my nervous system that presence is dangerous. Not because anyone was violent—but because nobody was there. Emotionally, nobody was watching. Nobody was sat in a chair counting how long it took me to swim the length. Nobody kept checking to make sure I was staying.

So when I became a mother, my body did the only thing it knew how to do. It overcorrected. It went from “nobody’s watching” to “I have to watch EVERYTHING because if I look away for a second, the worst will happen.” The hypervigilance wasn’t anxiety. It was my nervous system trying to be the parent I never had—but running on survival software instead of presence.

Being present and being hypervigilant look similar from the outside. Both involve watching your kids. Both involve being there. But they feel completely different on the inside. One is grounded. The other is terror wearing a mum costume.

I’ve been doing somatic work. I’ve been sitting with the sensations in my body instead of explaining them away. I’ve been letting old memories surface, letting my throat unstick, letting my body show me what my mind decided to forget.

And yesterday, by the pool, without trying, without thinking about it, without it being a big dramatic moment—I was just present.

Not hypervigilant. Not performing. Not scanning for danger. Just a woman in a chair with cold feet, counting to fifteen while her daughter swam the length, watching her son be brave on a slide, and feeling her body stay soft while they lived.

My daughter kept checking I was there. And I was. Not because I was forcing myself. Not because I was white-knuckling through it. Because I wanted to be there. Because watching them was enough. Because my body, for once, wasn’t telling me something terrible was about to happen.

It was telling me: oh, ok. This is what safe feels like.

If you’re a mum who watches her kids play and can’t relax—who sits by the pool with her jaw clenched and her shoulders up by her ears, who runs disaster scenarios while everyone else sees a normal Tuesday—I want you to know that it gets quieter. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But the volume turns down. The bracing softens. And one day you’re sat in a chair watching your son do something stupid on a float and instead of your whole body screaming, it just says:

Oh, ok.

And that’s enough.

She did beat him on the length, by the way. And she wants that on the record.

I need to say that upfront because everything that follows might sound like I did, and I want to be honest about the fact that for most of my life, I didn’t think any of this was worth mentioning. There was food on the table. Clothes on my back. A house with a garden. Two parents who went to work and came home. Nobody hit me. Nobody locked me in a room. If you’d asked the neighbours, they’d have told you we were fine.

We were not fine. But we looked it. And in our house, looking it was the same as being it.

My dad was a mechanical engineer. He worked abroad for months at a time. It was never in a dramatic, absent-father way—just in a quiet, steady, “dad’s not here again” way. He came home. He left again. The gaps in between were just... gaps. Spaces where a father should have been, filled with nothing in particular.

My parents drank.

Not what anyone would call a problem. Not falling-down, not violent, not scary. Whiskey, mostly. In the way that a lot of people in the ‘80s and ‘90s drank, which is to say regularly and without anyone ever naming it.

But sometimes my mum would do this thing.

She’d put on my dad’s underwear and his vest. She’d wrap a sweatband around her hair. She’d grab a frying pan from the kitchen and burst into the living room doing a John McEnroe impression. “The ball was IN, man!” Full performance. Full commitment.

I remember sitting on the sofa watching her. I remember laughing. I remember finding it funny and surreal at the same time—like watching something I didn’t quite understand but knew I was supposed to enjoy. What is she doing? Why is she doing this?

I was maybe twelve.

I didn’t know the word for what I was watching. I do now. I was watching a woman who was so invisible in her own marriage that she had to put on a costume and become someone else to be seen. In her husband’s clothes. Performing. Because sober, present, just-her wasn’t getting the attention she was starving for.

She was doing the thing I’d spend the next 40 years doing. Performing to be noticed. Except she used a frying pan and a sweatband, and I used achievement and overwork and a smile that never quite reached my eyes.

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My childhood wasn’t bad. It was absent.

There’s a difference, and it’s almost harder to name, because there’s nothing to point at. No bruises. No raised voices. No locked doors. Just two parents who were physically present and emotionally somewhere else. My dad at work. My mum in a glass of whisky and a performance nobody asked for.

And me on the sofa, learning.

Learning that you don’t make a fuss. Learning that you read the room before you speak. Learning that the correct response to something being wrong is to act like nothing’s wrong. Learning that what the neighbours think matters more than what you feel.

I learned to be the easy kid. The one who didn’t need anything. The one who figured things out on her own because asking felt like too much. The one who watched her mum perform for attention and decided, somewhere deep in her body, that she would never be that desperate. She would never need anyone that much.

So she just stopped needing.

I started somatic therapy recently.

For anyone who doesn’t know, that’s therapy that works through the body, not just the mind. Instead of talking about what happened, you feel where it lives. You notice what your shoulders are doing. What your stomach is holding. Where your jaw is clenched. The body stores everything the mind decides to forget.

And my body has been remembering things I didn’t know I’d forgotten.

Last week in a session, my therapist asked me to notice what was happening in my body. I dropped in. The sensation was in my throat—scratchy, tight, like something was stuck there. I stayed with it instead of explaining it away. Just noticed. Just breathed.

And then a voice came up. Not a thought—a voice. From somewhere old.

What’s the point of even saying anything?

I stayed with that too. And then the memory surfaced.

I was about nineteen and was out drinking at a local pub. I’d just ordered my next Black Russian and asked my ‘new friend’ to watch my drink while I went to the bathroom. When I came back she pulled me to a corner. Next minute she had my by my throat and was punching me in the face while keeping me at arms length. I was trying to fend her off, pulling at her hands, protecting myself.

I ran home. I remember my legs moving before my brain caught up. I remember getting to the front door and shaking so hard I couldn’t get the key in the lock. When I finally did, I leaned my back against the door and sobbed. My mum was in bed and dad was working away again.

I told my mum the next day because I knew what she was going to say if I woke her up. I was right: Don’t make a fuss. What would the neighbours think?

I got punched in the face, ran home shaking, sobbed against a locked door, and the message was: keep it quiet. Don’t let anyone see. Your pain is less important than the appearance of everything being fine.

And here’s where the two memories meet.

The woman who told me not to make a fuss was the same woman who dressed up in her husband’s underwear and performed John McEnroe with a frying pan because she was starving for attention she couldn’t ask for. She couldn’t hold my pain because nobody ever held hers. She couldn’t let me be seen because she’d spent her whole life not being seen herself. The rule she gave me—what would the neighbours think—was the rule she’d been living by long before I was born.

She wasn’t being cruel. She was passing down the only survival strategy she had. Contain it. Swallow it. Keep the surface smooth. She taught me to disappear because disappearing was all she knew.

Two memories from the same house. The same lesson taught two different ways. From the McEnroe performance I learned that needing attention looks desperate, so never need anything that visibly. From the pub response I learned that when something happens to you, your job is to contain it. One taught me through watching. The other taught me through being told directly.

I filed it all away. Not as trauma—just as life. Just as what happens. I literally forgot the pub even happened until last week.

But here’s the thing that stopped me cold. While I was fending her off, pulling at her arms, I must have torn something in my elbow. A micro-tear. Nothing I noticed at the time. Nothing that showed up for years.

Five years ago, I developed tennis elbow out of nowhere, apparently. I blamed the weights I’d been lifting. Maybe it was the weights. Or maybe my body was recreating an injury from a night I didn’t even remember, because that’s what bodies do. They hold what we won’t.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because I spent 40 years thinking I was fine. Thinking I didn’t have trauma. Thinking that because my childhood looked normal from the outside, whatever was happening on the inside didn’t count.

It counts.

The absence counts. The silence counts. The “don’t make a fuss” counts. The watching your mum disappear into a bottle and a performance counts. The dad who was there but not there counts. The learning, at seven and eight and ten years old, that the safest thing to be is invisible—that counts.

Not because it was the worst thing that ever happened to anyone. It wasn’t. But because it was the thing that shaped everything that came after. Every relationship I over-functioned in. Every job where I performed until I burned out. Every time I swallowed something that hurt because making a fuss felt more dangerous than the pain.

What would the neighbours think? They’d think we were fine.

We were not fine.

And if you grew up in a house like mine—a house that looked right but felt empty, where nothing “bad” happened but nothing real happened either, where you learned to be easy and quiet and small—I want you to know:

You’re allowed to call it what it was.

Even if no one else would.

If this landed somewhere in your body that you weren’t expecting, sit with it for a minute before you scroll. You don’t have to do anything with it. Just let yourself notice what’s there.

Not once. Not in 51 years.

I need you to sit with that for a second, because I had to sit with it too, and it winded me.

At 16, I picked my college course because my dad was a mechanical engineer. Weir Pumps — I still remember the company name, which tells you something about how deeply I absorbed the things that were never said out loud. He never asked me to follow him. He didn’t have to. I was the kind of kid who could read a room before I could read a book. I knew what would make him proud. So I chose the closest thing to what I thought he did and that was electrical engineering.

I hated it.

Not in a way anyone would notice. I just quietly didn’t belong, the way I’d been quietly not belonging my whole life. I was the only girl in the class and stuck out like a sore thumb. By year two I’d left, gone back to redo my GCSEs, passed with flying colours because I was never stupid — I was just pointing all my intelligence at the wrong target. At someone else’s target.

And that became the pattern.

I entered the workforce as an admin assistant and was there for a couple of years. My boss poached me. I moved. Then moved again — internally to London, which I hated too. Eventually I landed at an American investment bank and stayed for ten years. High pressure, fast pace, ungodly hours. Work hard, drink hard — that was the deal, and I took it because London felt like arriving somewhere. I bought my own house. I thought that meant I’d made it.

I hadn’t made it. I’d just gotten very good at performing.

The drinking wasn’t a problem. It was a solution. It was the thing that let me keep going at a pace my body was screaming at me to stop. But I didn’t know how to listen to my body. I didn’t know I had one — not really. I had a thing I dressed and fed and moved through the world in, but I wasn’t in it. I was somewhere behind my own eyes, managing everything from a distance.

I got married because the timeline said I should.

I lost a baby.

I kept going, because that’s what performing looks like — you absorb the unbearable and you keep the mask on. You get up. You try again. You don’t fall apart because who would hold the pieces? Not you. You don’t even know where the pieces are.

I became a single parent. And because my ex had moved on, I decided I should too — not because I wanted to, but because being alone felt like failing at yet another thing I was supposed to be good at. So I dated. I found someone who wouldn’t commit. I closed that door. I opened another one.

Every chapter of my life has been a reaction to the last one. I reacted to failure by overachieving. I reacted to heartbreak by performing. I reacted to loneliness by filling the space. I reacted to someone else’s choices by making mine in response.

I have never once just... chosen something because my hands wanted it.

I moved countries. Different culture. Different rules. I was naive enough to think it would be easy, because I’d survived everything else and survival had become my personality. But surviving isn’t living. Surviving is just your nervous system running a programme that keeps the lights on while nobody’s home.

I drank through it. I got pregnant three more times. I went vegan and started losing my hair. I picked up weights and got tennis elbow — or maybe it wasn’t the weights at all. Maybe my body was just finding new ways to say what I wouldn’t let my mouth say.

At some point in my 40s, I started to crack. Not collapse — crack. Like light getting into a house that’s been boarded up for decades. Tiny fractures. Moments where I’d feel something and not immediately stuff it back down. Moments where I’d think this isn’t mine. This life. These choices. None of this is mine.

I’m 51 now.

And for the first time in my life, I am building something that nobody asked me to build.

Nobody poached me into it. No man is at the centre of it. No timeline told me it was time. No failure pushed me sideways into it. I didn’t choose it because my dad would be proud, or because society said I should, or because someone else chose something and I had to react.

I chose it because my hands wanted it.

I’ve been crocheting for 15 years. Quietly. While the kids slept. While the marriage strained. While my nervous system screamed. I’d pick up a hook and everything would slow down. My breathing would change. My jaw would unclench. The yarn moving through my fingers was the only time I was actually inside my own body instead of managing it from a distance.

I didn’t have the language for it then. I do now. It’s called regulation. It’s called presence. It’s called coming home to yourself through your hands.

I’m building something called Limn.

It means to draw with precision. To depict something in sharp, careful detail. Medieval artists who painted those illuminated manuscripts — they were limning. It’s an old word that most people have never heard.

It’s also my four children’s initials. In birth order. I didn’t plan that. I didn’t rearrange them to make it work. They just... are. L-I-M-N. Limn.

I’m designing crochet that fits real bodies. Not a size chart. Not a letter. Not a box someone else decided you should fit into. Your body. Your measurements. Your yarn. Your hands.

I’m doing it because it’s mine. Because for the first time, nothing and no one is driving this except the fact that I want to.

And if you’ve spent your whole life reacting — to your parents’ expectations, to your partner’s choices, to the timeline, to the performance, to the survival program that’s been running so long you forgot there was a person underneath it — I want you to know that it’s not too late to choose something just because you want it.

It was never too late.

You just had to survive long enough to remember that you’re allowed.

This is the first time I’ve written about what I’m building. There will be more. If you want to watch me figure it out in real time — the mess, the math, the mistakes — stay.

I booked the trip.

Not “someday.” Not “when the kids are older.” Not “when things settle down.” April. This April.

Grand Canyon. Sedona. Energy vortexes. Red rock. The kind of places I’ve been pinning for years and never actually going to.

I spent New Year’s Day scrolling Pinterest, looking at desert landscapes, and something clicked. I’ve had Alaska and Japan on my bucket list forever. Then I added the Southwest, along with a dozen other places. And they all just sat there. Waiting for permission.

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The permission never came. So I just... did it.

Eleven days. Me and my kids. My daughter turns 13 at the edge of something 2 billion years old. We’re doing Meow Wolf and Cadillac Ranch and hiking Cathedral Rock and standing at the rim at sunset.

I didn’t ask anyone if it was okay. I just booked it.

And the only thing I could think was: what the hell have I been waiting for?

2025 was the year I started to wake up. But booking this trip? I felt something I haven’t felt in years. Actual excitement.

Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Our vacations have always been typical family trips. Theme parks. Pools. We live in a resort area, so being away never really feels like being away. Just the same activities in a different zip code.

I wanted this to be different. Not just another pool and a buffet. I wanted us to actually do something.

We’re flying there and renting a car. Covering real ground. I’m scared, which is strange because I used to do this all the time when I was younger. But I’m also more excited than I’ve been in years.

The kids are too. They’ve never been on a plane. We’ve never traveled off the East Coast.

After I finished booking, I had this thought: what if each kid had a disposable camera and a journal? What if they captured their own moments and made their own scrapbooks?

Which sent me down the junk journaling rabbit hole.

A few hours later, the kids were on board. We went to Hobby Lobby and filled a cart. Paper. Ephemera. Scissors. Glue. Came home and spread it all across the table. No screens. No agenda. Just making things with our hands.

Right now we’re junk journaling for the fun of it. But when we leave for the trip, we’ll each have a travel journal ready to fill.

I don’t know why it took me this long. To book a trip. To sit at a table with my kids and create something for no reason.

But I’m done waiting to feel ready.

Some things you just have to choose before they feel safe.

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You’re not here to fix anything. You’re here to let it out.

Press play when you’re ready.

After my fourth baby, that was the only data point that mattered. I’d spend my days in the chaos of motherhood, then pour a glass of wine at 9pm to quiet the noise. I’d tell myself I’d start getting healthy tomorrow.

But tomorrow only arrived when I finally got serious. And by serious, I mean I turned my body into a project.

I weighed my food. I logged every almond. I hit the gym five days a week, then six. I tracked steps, water, protein, sleep. I was disciplined. I was focused. I was, as they say, locked in.

And the world rewarded me for it.

I dropped three dress sizes. I felt that sharp hit of pride when I looked in the mirror. For the first time in a decade, I felt like I had “gotten my body back.” We’re taught to celebrate this part. The grit. The visible results. The willpower.

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But while I was busy optimizing, my body was trying to get my attention.

It started with my elbows. A dull ache that turned into something I couldn’t ignore. Tennis elbow in both arms. The kind of injury that comes from pushing too hard, too fast, for too long.

Then came the comments. A woman from church stopped me in the grocery store. “Are you okay? Are you sick?”

I laughed it off. My husband told me I looked too thin. My mom said the same. I couldn’t hear them because I was too busy listening to the numbers. I thought I looked fit. They were seeing a woman running on fumes and calling it fine.

I wasn’t getting healthy. I was controlling myself. Those two things are not the same. I had traded the chaos of early motherhood for the obsession of wellness, and I called it discipline.

Instead of listening to my body, I was overriding it. Managing it like a machine that needed to perform, not something I actually lived in. On the outside, I looked like the picture of health. On the inside, I was exhausted.

Think about what a body does to bring four humans into the world. The pregnancies. The births. The years of broken sleep and constant giving. My body had never been allowed to just exist without a job to do.

I wasn’t caring for myself. I was performing health the same way I had performed “being fine” for years.

I see this pattern everywhere, especially in mothers. When your body has been needed and touched and depleted by everyone else for so long, turning toward yourself feels unfamiliar. Unsafe, even.

So we do it the only way we know how. With rules.

Structure feels safer than softness. Control feels more respectable than rest. A goal feels easier to chase than a feeling.

We treat our bodies like problems to solve. We try to force them back into some imaginary version of ourselves that probably never existed in the first place.

But a body that has carried life doesn’t need to be conquered. It needs to be heard.

When my elbows gave out, it wasn’t a failure. It was my body finally saying what I wouldn’t let it say. Please stop. I’m tired.

It starts when we stop asking “how do I fix this?” and start asking “what has my body been trying to tell me that I keep ignoring?”

Maybe your body doesn’t need more discipline today. Maybe it needs permission. To slow down. To stop earning its worth through its size. To just breathe.

Have you ever hit a goal and realized you left yourself behind getting there? What’s your body trying to tell you?

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You don’t have to say everything. You just have to let something move.

Press play when you’re ready.

What they don’t tell you is what happens after the dream comes true.

No one tells you about the slow vanishing act. The quiet exhaustion of being the one who makes everything work - the meals, the appointments, the emotional temperature of every room. No one thinks to ask if you’re okay because you look like you’re handling it. You’re always handling it.

I didn’t expect to feel this invisible.

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I love my kids with everything I am. I would die for them without hesitation. But some days I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I don’t recognize the woman staring back. Not because I’ve aged. Because she’s gone quiet. The one who had dreams that weren’t about other people. The one who had opinions and fire and wants. The one who existed before she became someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s everything.

I don’t know when I stopped being her. I just know I miss her.

My 12-year-old is pulling away. I know she’s supposed to. I know this is healthy, developmentally appropriate, all the things the books say. Knowing doesn’t make it hurt less. I’m losing access to her inner world right when she needs me to pretend I don’t notice. So I don’t say anything. I just watch her close doors that used to stay open.

My 20-year-old is choosing a life I wouldn’t choose for her. And I’m learning, slowly, painfully, that I can’t stop her. My job was never to build her life for her. It was to build her strong enough to build her own. Even when I hate what she’s building. Even when I want to shake her and say please, not that. I have to let her go. I don’t know how to do that and stay whole.

Somewhere in the middle of raising good humans, I stopped being one. Not a good human but a whole one. I poured everything into them and forgot to leave anything for me.

If you feel this too, I want you to know something.

You’re not “just venting.” You’re not being ungrateful. You’re not failing at the dream. You’re revealing something true - the weight so many of us carry in silence because we were told this was supposed to be enough. We don’t talk about it because admitting it’s hard feels like admitting we don’t love them enough.

That isn’t true. It was never true.

What if the dream isn’t broken? What if the story was? What if we were never supposed to disappear inside of motherhood, and no one gave us a map for staying whole while we raised whole humans?

I keep asking myself: what would it look like to mother without vanishing? To give without emptying? To love them fiercely and still have something left for myself?

I don’t have the answer yet. I’m just sitting with the question.

What about you - when did you first notice yourself disappearing?

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You didn’t fail to belong. You were just never mirrored.

Press play when you’re ready.

I was twenty years old, standing in a Boots aisle, staring at a bottle of Oil of Ulay.

It was pink. It was mysterious. Nowhere on the glass did it say what it actually did. It just whispered: “Share the secret of a younger looking you.”

I was twenty. What was I trying to look younger than? My teens? My childhood?

I bought it anyway. I bought it because the labels sounded like a laboratory. AHAs. Liposomes. Collagen-boosting. I didn’t know what they were, but I knew they were the answer to a question I hadn’t yet been asked:

What is wrong with you? And the follow-up: Let us fix it.

I spent the nineties standing in front of mirrors, cataloging my flaws before I’d even finished growing into my face. That was the Machine in its infancy. It was a magazine. It was a commercial. It was a billboard you eventually drove past.

The Machine Evolved

My daughter is twenty-one now.

She is beautiful. Not “mother-beautiful”—the kind of beauty that stops you in the street. But she doesn’t see it. She lies on her bed for hours, her face bathed in the blue light of TikTok, absorbing a parade of women who have been surgically dismantled and reassembled.

She sees filler, filters, and buccal fat removal. Then she looks at me and tells me she wants to change her butt. Her nose. Her life.

I tell her she’s beautiful. She rolls her eyes. I tell her it’s what’s inside that matters. She doesn’t believe me.

I stand in her doorway, my hand resting on the frame, feeling that familiar tightness in my chest. It’s the feeling of holding a truth that has no currency.

This is the hardest part of modern motherhood: You can hold the absolute truth of who your child is, and it doesn’t matter. Because the screen in her hand is louder than a mother’s voice will ever be.

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Same Ghost, Different Bottle

In the nineties, they sold us hope in a jar. It was “preventative.” It was about staying “fresh.”

But I could put the magazine down. The ads ended when the show came back on.

My daughter’s Machine never sleeps. It follows her to bed. It’s the first thing she sees when she wakes up. The algorithm has mapped her insecurities better than I ever could; it learns what she hates about herself and feeds it back to her in 4K.

The Machine didn’t change; it just got precise. It moved from the pharmacy shelf to her pocket. It moved from “younger looking skin” to “a whole new skeleton.”

It’s not selling her creams anymore. It’s selling her the scalpel.

The Inheritance

I sit with the guilt like a stone. Did I teach her this?

Did she see me squinting at my reflection? Did she hear me apologize for my body before she even knew what a body was for? Probably. The Machine got me first. And even though I’ve spent decades unlearning its lies, I couldn’t work fast enough to protect her.

I wanted to raise a daughter who didn’t view the mirror as a battlefield. I failed. Not for lack of trying, but because I was one voice shouting against a billion-dollar engine designed to make her feel like a “before” photo.

The Only Resistance

I wish I had a tidy Substack ending. Five Ways to Hack the Algorithm. How to Save Your Daughter in Three Steps.

I don’t have them. I’m just a woman in a doorway, watching my daughter scroll through a gallery of edited ghosts, wondering how I’m supposed to compete with a God that fits in her palm.

I don’t think I’m supposed to win this fight. But I refuse to stop showing up for it.

So I keep telling her she’s beautiful. Even when it’s white noise to her. I keep naming the lie. I keep standing in the doorway, holding the unedited version of her in my mind—the version that hasn’t been flattened or sold.

The Machine wants my silence. It wants my resignation. It wants me to agree that she is a “work in progress.”

I have no cure. I only have my witness. I am still here, standing in the light, refusing to look away.

For now, that is the only resistance I trust.

I was twenty, buying hope in a pink bottle.

She’s twenty-one, drowning in a screen.

The Machine never changed. We just stopped noticing when it swallowed us whole.

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