The Body I’m Living In

The Body I’m Living In

There’s a specific kind of tired that doesn’t show up on your face.

It lives lower than that. Deeper. In the places nobody thinks to look — the nerve that runs from your spine down through everything, the one that reminds you it exists at the worst possible moments. Getting up. Sitting down. Laughing too hard. Reaching for something on a shelf like it’s supposed to be a nothing moment and feeling your whole lower half light up in response.

Just existing inside yourself on a Tuesday like it’s supposed to be simple.

And even as I write that, there’s a voice that shows up almost immediately. The one that says you have no right to complain. The one that runs through the inventory of everything that could be worse — and trust me, I know it could be. More sections of my spine fused. No use of my legs. A body even further from the one I was supposed to have. There are people carrying things so much heavier than mine and I know that and I hold it and sometimes it makes me feel genuinely pathetic for struggling at all.

So I go quiet. Not because I’m okay. Because I’ve already talked myself out of my own pain before anyone else gets the chance to.

That guilt is its own kind of weight. And most people who carry it never mention it — which means most people have no idea how many of us are out here silently invalidating ourselves while also quietly falling apart.

…

I was twenty-four the first time my body really betrayed me. Twenty-four. Which sounds like a fact but lands more like a grief the older I get. Because twenty-four is supposed to be invincible. Twenty-four is supposed to be the year you’re still figuring out who you are, still doing things badly and recovering fast, still living in a body that forgives you. Mine stopped forgiving me right around the time I was just getting started.

Surgery at twenty-five. A spinal fusion at twenty-six. I was being rebuilt from the inside out before I had fully figured out who I was on the outside. Before I had fully lived in myself yet.

And I made a kind of peace with it — I want to be clear about that, because this isn’t a story about bitterness. I accepted that my body keeps a tab. That some seasons cost more than others. That this is part of the life I live now and there is beauty in that life and I choose it every day.

But peace doesn’t mean the grief went away. It just means I learned to carry them both at the same time.

…

The grief is specific. It doesn’t announce itself — it shows up in small, particular moments that catch you off guard. Watching people move through the world without thinking about it. Getting an invitation somewhere and running a silent calculation before you even respond — what’s the seating situation, how far is the walk, how much will this cost me tomorrow. Wanting to just go the way other people just go, spontaneously, without the mental inventory of what your body can afford right now.

There are things I have watched from the sidelines. Things I have had to mourn quietly and without much ceremony because nobody really prepares you to grieve your own mobility, your own spontaneity, the version of yourself that could move through the world without negotiating with it first.

And on the days the fire runs through my lower back and down my legs — because that’s what it is, fire, electric and relentless and indifferent to your plans — on those days the grief gets louder. Not because the pain is new but because the reminder is. That this is the body I live in. That this was decided for me when I was barely twenty-four years old and didn’t know yet what I was agreeing to.

…

What I want people to understand is that I still show up. Every single day. Despite all of it.

I go to work. I meet my obligations. I move through my life with as much fullness as I can hold. I laugh. I make plans. I do not let people see it most of the time because I have learned, the way you learn things through repetition, that invisible pain makes people uncomfortable if you mention it too often. So you calibrate. You share just enough to be honest and hold back enough to still seem manageable.

You think about every movement. Genuinely, consciously think about things most people’s brains never touch — how you’re sitting, how long you’ve been sitting, whether that thing you’re about to do is going to be something you pay for in three hours or three days. You build your life around these calculations so quietly and so automatically that most people have no idea the architecture underneath.

And you do all of this because what’s the alternative? This is the one body you have. So you do your damnedest to live a normal life inside it and most of the time you almost pull it off.

…

What breaks something quietly — not dramatically, it never announces itself — is when you are already in the middle of all of that, already managing the fire and the grief and the calculations and the guilt for even feeling any of it, and someone who knows your history still somehow can’t see it. When your pushing through reads as fine. When your silence reads as okay. When the fact that you showed up at all gets taken at face value and the cost behind it stays invisible.

You want to hand them your body for a week. Your actual nervous system. Every calculation. Every morning. Every moment of choosing to go anyway.

Not as an accusation. Just as a question. Just once, to not have to translate yourself.

…

This is for anyone who has ever done the math before saying yes. Who has grieved quietly in a body the world still expected things from. Who was handed something heavy too young and just kept going because that’s all there was to do. Who has talked themselves out of their own pain before anyone else could.

Your suffering doesn’t need to be the worst suffering in the room to be real.

You’re not exaggerating. You’re not performing. You’re not pathetic.

You’re carrying something most people will never understand, and you’re living your life anyway.

I see you in it.