Madness, Body, and Belonging

Sometimes I feel like my mind and body live in different places. Like they’ve grown used to being apart. My body learned to brace. My mind learned to float away. I’ve been dissociating for as long as I can remember. It was a lifeline. A skill. A survival tool.

There are parts of my story that made leaving my body the only way I could stay alive.

And still, that leaving comes with its own kind of ache.

Madness has always been a part of me. Not in the way the world defines it. Not in a pathology. But in the way my nervous system holds too much. In the way I hear things others don’t. In the way my moods stretch wide. In the way my mind protects me with distance when the world gets too loud, too fast, too close.

I’ve been told that my experience makes me unreliable. That it’s not real. That it’s broken. But I know what I’ve lived. I know what I’ve survived. I know the sacred wisdom in the parts of my mind that refuse to play by someone else’s rules.

Madness is not separate from my body. It is my body. It is how my body holds trauma. How it remembers. How it screams. How it tries to soothe itself in the only ways it knows how.

The world taught me to be ashamed of that.

To be ashamed of zoning out in the middle of conversations. To be ashamed of not remembering entire days. To be ashamed of rocking, or stimming, or talking to myself. To be ashamed of needing space. Of needing slowness. Of needing care.

But what if my needs are not shameful?

What if the way my mind works is not a problem to fix, but a story to honor?

What if the distance between my mind and body isn’t something to erase but something to gently bridge?

Sometimes I try to come back to my body and it feels like too much. Too loud. Too raw. Too flooded. I used to think I had to force myself to stay. Now, I’m trying to move slowly. To give myself options. To let myself come home in pieces.

Sometimes that looks like putting my feet on the floor and noticing that I’m here. Sometimes it looks like naming the colors I see. Sometimes it’s curling up under a weighted blanket. Sometimes it’s turning off the world and letting my mind wander. Sometimes it’s letting myself leave and knowing I can return when I’m ready.

I’ve learned that embodiment doesn’t always mean being fully present. Sometimes it just means choosing not to abandon myself completely. Sometimes it’s staying with the feeling just long enough to soften its edge. Sometimes it’s not judging the way my body and mind respond to pain.

When I am in community with others who also live with madness, everything softens. I feel less alone. Less weird. Less broken. We speak a language without words. We hold each other in the in-between. We let each other be whole without needing to be well.

In those spaces, my body doesn’t have to prove anything. My mind doesn’t have to perform stability. I get to exist as I am. And that feels like a kind of belonging I rarely find anywhere else.

I am still learning to belong to myself.

To belong to a body that holds pain and brilliance and fragmentation and wisdom. To belong to a mind that wanders and wonders and weaves together a different kind of truth. To belong to a story that doesn’t always make sense but still deserves to be heard.

Madness lives in me. And I am learning, slowly, to live with it. To live as it. To befriend it. To stop running from the parts of me that saved my life.

Belonging is not something I find outside of myself. It begins in how I listen to all the pieces of me that are asking to be held.