body story
I’ve loved words since I was little. I would read them, write them, create sentences just to fit them into even if they didn’t make sense. These words were a nest I could crawl inside, hide, and yet be discovered by all at the same time.
I kept a thesaurus by my bed, my favorite book. At night, I’d close my eyes and let my fingers scroll the page. I’d open and find a word I’d never seen before. I would write it on my hand and use it throughout the day. These words became my lifeline, my shaw shank escape, my break out of this dark world, ‘an axe to the frozen pond within me,’ my much needed story.
This story is about writing. It is also not about writing. This is about words and the lack of words, an indecipherable language. Writer and therapist, Annie Rogers calls this the unsayable, the words you can’t voice but your body somehow speaks.
I began to hear my body speak in a whisper, a still small voice so quiet it sounded like breathing. The earthquake of my life had finally stopped and the only sound was silence. Silence is louder than noise when you’re not used to it. Outside the window of my body was the debris of many years. Where do I even begin? Budging the door open, I could see piles high of carnage the storm brought in. It was my life in stacks—the good, the bad, the forgotten. Starting from the bottom, I began to sort through it all. One by one, moving memories around like a 10,000 piece puzzle. The larger pieces were easy, it was the small fragmented ones that were difficult to grasp.
Some memories are so fine, like dust, they fall through the cracks in between your fingers, intermingling with sand, impossible to tell the difference. The body knows though. It feels these memories like the itchy fibers of insulation. You can’t see them from far away, but up close they sparkle in the sunlight.
It had been a couple of months when I moved into a queen bed at the onset of a depression and never left. The room was dark with heavy burgundy shades that shut out Louisiana light. I could hear the coffee pot brewing and the shuffling of productive feet, but all I could do was dig myself deeper under the cocoon of my down comforter. It felt like I had collapsed under the curtain call of my life.
When I finally began to emerge from this warm asylum, my body had language—when it spoke, I knew its voice. Like an old friend whom you hadn’t talked to in ages, but then in an instant of being with them, it’s like nothing changed. My body felt like that. Its words poked, literally they stung me throughout my legs, arms, and face.
Knock knock?
Whose there?
your body.
Your body who?
your truth.
This was the beginning of many sensations that came. Painful pin-like pricks, screaming muscles and joints, my head that felt like a vice, the collapse of my immune system. Our body speaks, and mine was saying wake up! Every week was spent in the hospital with some new symptom and zero explanations. This discomfort, as frustrating as it was, had me looking at the sparking embers of shattered memory for the first time with a question: ‘what do you want?’
When we ask our body a question—we are beginning to trust it as a storyteller.
As my body spoke through the symptomatic, I followed the bread crumbs to my story. Each piece led to another question, but rarely an answer. I was hungry though and knew that this is where the food was. No traps, no tricks, just truth.
It’s hard to go where the truth is. It’s easy to write around it. I want to put flowers around the grave and observe. I don’t want to get into ground, smell the dirt, taste its grit. But this is what Jesus did—he went into the ground, past the place of bleeding, beyond the desperation of hope. He tasted death and died.
Then the miracle, the shaking ground, the absurdity of death, the resurrection. This is what storytelling does— it raises the dead, lifting doubts and beliefs from the grave. It says, “look at my hands, my feet. Stop doubting and believe.”
As my body spoke with a language I couldn’t understand, I figured the only way to interpret was to go where the pain was.
Hello body.
It had been a while since I had moved much, and the shooting pains throughout didn’t do much to inspire, but I knew this body needed to write something. My body is a pen spilling ink. My life is paper to be written upon. My will moves the pen across the page. Look! I can read my life!
This is what happens when we let our body translate its story. We can be a part of the editing process.
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Megan Febuary is an author, trauma-informed book coach and creative mentor. Helping women write their books, heal their stories, and understand their unique human design. You can learn more about working with Megan at meganfebuary.com
