For a long time, I thought my body was something fragile.
A thing that could be broken.
A thing that carried evidence of everything that had happened to me.
A thing I dragged behind me while trying to survive.
But lately, I've been wondering what my body would say if it could tell its version of the story.
I think it would begin like this:
I never left you.
Not when they cut me open.
Not when life and death stood in the same room while your children fought to stay.
Not when you came home with empty arms and a full heart that didn't know where to put all the love.
Not when grief settled into your chest and built a home there.
Not when exhaustion wrapped itself around your bones.
Not when you stopped listening.
I stayed.
I have spent years trying to understand my body through what it endured.
The surgeries.
The losses.
The violations.
The fear.
The endless demands.
The impossible weight of carrying more than one person should ever have to carry.
But when I look back now, that isn't the story I want to tell.
Because what amazes me isn't what happened to my body.
It's what my body did with it.
It carried life.
It carried love.
It carried heartbreak.
It carried memories.
It carried absences.
It carried goodbyes I wasn't ready to say.
It carried me through days I don't remember surviving.
And all the while, it kept whispering the same thing:
"I'm still here."
There were years when I treated my body like an adversary.
When I saw its anxiety as betrayal.
Its exhaustion as weakness.
Its numbness as failure.
Its tears as inconvenience.
I wanted it to work harder.
Push longer.
Need less.
Feel less.
I didn't understand that everything I resented was something it had developed to keep me alive.
The tension.
The vigilance.
The shutting down.
The leaving.
The surviving.
My body wasn't fighting against me.
It was fighting for me.
The tragedy is that sometimes survival requires us to leave ourselves.
To disconnect.
To become strangers to our own needs.
To stop feeling because feeling hurts too much.
And so I spent years living inside my body without truly living with it.
Years asking it to keep going while rarely asking how it was doing.
Years trying to earn safety instead of creating it.
Years believing my body existed to carry everyone else.
To nurture.
To produce.
To give.
To endure.
To survive.
Until one day, I became tired of surviving.
Not life.
Just survival itself.
Tired of living as though my body only existed in relation to what had happened to it.
And slowly, something began to change.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But gently.
I started listening.
To the tightness in my chest.
To the ache in my shoulders.
To the fatigue that sleep couldn't touch.
To the quiet wisdom beneath the noise.
The more I listened, the more I realized my body had never stopped trying to lead me home.
Not home to the person I was before.
Home to the person I am.
And that has been the greatest surprise of all.
My body is not asking me to become someone new.
It is asking me to belong to myself again.
To trust what I feel.
To honor what I need.
To recognize when something is not safe.
To rest without guilt.
To take up space without apology.
To stop treating my own humanity as something that has to be earned.
Today, when I look at my body, I don't see a collection of wounds.
I don't see all the ways it was used, stretched, controlled, exhausted, or tested.
I see a companion.
A witness.
A keeper of stories.
A living record of resilience, love, grief, hope, and survival.
But most importantly, I see something I lost for a while.
I see something that belongs to me.
For years, parts of me were taken.
My time.
My energy.
My voice.
My choices.
My sense of safety.
But this body?
This body stayed.
And now, slowly, tenderly, I am reclaiming it.
Not as a battlefield.
Not as evidence.
Not as a container for pain.
As home.
A home I am learning to trust again.
A home I am learning to listen to.
A home I am learning to love.
And for the first time in a very long time, when I place my hand over my heart, I don't think about everything this body has survived.
I think about everything it has carried me toward.
Back to myself.
