Not at Home in My Body

There are days when my body feels like a stranger. Sometimes even an enemy. It has never felt like a safe place to land. Pain, illness, trauma, and dissociation have all shaped the way I live inside this body. The way I don't.

I was a victim of early childhood sexual abuse. In my adult life, I survived two relationships marked by intimate partner violence. I live with multiple physical disabilities now. Chronic pain. Chronic illness. Chronic fatigue. Migraines. Endometriosis. Limited mobility. These aren't just diagnoses. They are lived realities that make moving through the world exhausting.

I also live with madness. I am neurodivergent. I have struggled with an eating disorder and self-injury since I was about twelve years old. For most of my life, I’ve been trying to escape this body. To control it. To punish it. To disappear inside of it. To make it quiet. To make it stop hurting.

And then last year came a cancer diagnosis. Just when I thought my relationship to my body couldn’t get more complicated, it did. How do you trust a body that feels like it has betrayed you at every turn? How do you love something that has always felt like too much and never enough at the same time?

The truth is, I don’t love my body. I don’t even know what that means. The concept of loving my body feels unreachable. It always has. What feels possible, on a good day, is working toward something softer. Something more neutral. A sense of being a little less at war. A little more at ease.

Navigating this body story has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But doing it alone makes it even harder. There’s something about being in community with others who are also carrying complex histories, tangled relationships with their bodies. Each time I sit in a space with others who get it, who are also navigating the ache and the fight and the tenderness, something inside me shifts.

There’s a lightness. A softening. A reminder that I am not alone.

Together, we breathe a collective sigh. We let our shoulders drop. We let our jaws loosen. We let our breath just be. We let our bellies soften. And in that shared space, we hold one another’s truths. We witness each other’s body stories. We meet each other with care.

It feels like sacred ground.

So many of us are carrying stories etched into our skin, our bones, our nervous systems. Stories we were never meant to carry alone. If you're reading this and your relationship with your body feels heavy or painful or distant, I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you. There is space for your story. There is space for your grief. There is space for your healing, whatever that might look like.

You don’t have to love your body to be worthy of care. You don’t have to feel at home in it to deserve gentleness. And you don’t have to navigate any of this alone.

There is power in being witnessed. There is healing in softening together.

May we keep finding each other. May we keep making space for our stories. May we keep breathing together.