I kept telling myself I was coping. My body had a different answer.
The neck thing started first.
A tightness, high up on the right side, that came and went without reason. I’d roll my shoulders, stretch briefly, decide it was the way I’d slept. A week later it was still there. Then two weeks. I bought a new pillow. I told myself it was posture, it was stress, it was the particular way I hunched over my laptop — all of which were probably true, and none of which were the whole answer.
Then came the exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix. Not tiredness — I knew tiredness. This was something heavier, something that sat in my chest and behind my eyes, something that was there when I woke up and still there when I lay down at night. I told myself I was doing too much. I told myself I needed a weekend. I told myself a lot of things.
I’m fine. I just need to get through this week.
—
I had constructed, over many years, a very convincing internal story about how I was doing.
In the story, I was managing. I was coping. I was tired, yes, and the circumstances of my life were hard, yes, but I was handling them. People in harder situations managed worse things every day. I wasn’t falling apart. I was functioning.
What I didn’t understand then — what I’ve come to understand slowly, and only partly — is that functioning is not the same as fine. That a body can carry what a mind refuses to name. That the things we don’t grieve, don’t process, don’t allow ourselves to feel in real time have to go somewhere, and they go into the body, and the body keeps a more honest account than we do.
My body was keeping the account. I just wasn’t reading the statements.
—
I started noticing my jaw first — the way it was clenched, always, at a low constant pressure I’d stopped registering as unusual. My shoulders lived somewhere near my ears. I’d catch myself holding my breath without having decided to, and release it, and then ten minutes later I’d be holding it again.
None of it was dramatic. None of it said, in clear language: something is wrong and you need to pay attention. It was just the slow accumulation of a body quietly signalling, in the only language available to it, that it was carrying more than I was willing to admit.
I went to a doctor about the neck. She asked about my stress levels. I said they were manageable. I believed that when I said it.
She gave me exercises and told me to come back in a month. I did the exercises for three days and then stopped because I was too busy. The neck kept aching. I kept telling myself it was posture.
—
The thing that finally broke through wasn’t a diagnosis or a crisis.
It was a massage.
Someone’s hands on my shoulders and they said, very quietly, that I was holding an enormous amount of tension here — and I started to cry. Not gently. In the way that happens when something releases that has been held for a very long time and the body suddenly doesn’t have to hold it anymore.
I cried in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to cry in months, maybe longer. And afterward I lay there feeling something I didn’t have a word for — emptied, but also lighter. Like a room that had finally been aired out.
I went home and sat in my garden chair for a while before going inside the house. I have not been fine, I thought. I don’t think I’ve been fine for quite a long time.
—
I’ve learned since then, through therapy, through practice, through paying more attention than I used to — that the body doesn’t lie in the way the mind can.
Your mind can block or forget undesirable things that happened to you, but your body remembers.
The mind is excellent at narrative. It can construct a very reasonable-sounding account of how things are. It can explain the neck pain and the jaw tension and the breath-holding in ways that don’t require looking at anything harder. It is patient, and persuasive, and sometimes it is protecting you. And sometimes it is just keeping you from something you’re not ready to feel.
The body doesn’t have that kind of patience. It’s not trying to protect you or convince you. It’s just responding, honestly, to what it’s been asked to carry.
Mine had been asked to carry quite a lot.
—
I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer here. This isn’t the part where I tell you what to do about your own body’s signals, or how I solved the problem, or what the neck tension was really about.
I’m still learning to listen. I’m better at it than I was — which is a low bar, but it’s a real one. I notice now when my shoulders have climbed back up. I notice the jaw. I’ve become, slowly, someone who takes those signals slightly more seriously than I once did, who tries to ask what I’m holding rather than just managing the symptom.
It’s not a practice I’m consistent about. Some weeks I’m good at it. Some weeks I’m back to the pillow-buying and the it’s-just-posture and the I’m-fine-I-just-need-to-get-through-this-week.
But there’s a difference now: when my body speaks, there’s a part of me that at least turns around to look. That’s more than I used to do.
That’s maybe the only thing I know for certain about this: the body was there first. It knew before I did. And it was right.