The Body Keeps Score

My birthday is this week.

Christmas is next.

And today, my body stopped.

I’ve been sick all day—the kind of sick that doesn’t come from nowhere. The kind that has been building quietly while I kept going. While I showed up. While I held space. While I told myself I could deal with it later.

Last week, I didn’t fall apart.

I stayed functional.

I stayed useful.

I stayed busy.

I cried, but only in small doses.

In between tasks.

In the car.

In the shower.

Just enough to release pressure. Not enough to touch the depth of it.

I told myself that counted.

But grief is not fooled by productivity.

It doesn’t respond to compartmentalizing.

It doesn’t soften just because you’re trying your best.

It waits.

It settles into the body when it’s not given space in the heart.

This morning, I woke up and my body couldn’t carry it anymore. Everything felt heavy. Inflamed. Raw. Like my nervous system finally dropped the rope and said, I can’t do this alone anymore.

I didn’t choose this.

I adapted the way people do when life keeps asking for more than they have to give.

Survival mode doesn’t look dramatic.

It looks like competence.

It looks like showing up anyway.

It looks like postponing your own pain because the world doesn’t pause for it.

And then one day, your body pauses you.

This time of year makes grief louder.

A birthday that marks time passing instead of celebration.

Another year older, carrying a life that looks nothing like the one I imagined.

Christmas approaching with its lights and music and expectations—while my system braces for memories I can’t prepare for.

There’s a particular loneliness in this kind of grief.

The kind that doesn’t announce itself.

The kind that lives under the surface while you keep functioning.

People don’t always see it.

But the body does.

The body remembers every moment you swallowed emotion to stay upright.

Every time you chose responsibility over release.

Every time you told yourself, I’ll deal with this later.

Later is now.

I’ll be sick for a few days. I know that.

This isn’t something that passes overnight.

This is my body asking for stillness the only way it knows how.

There is no lesson here.

No silver lining.

No “everything happens for a reason.”

Just the truth:

Grief is not just emotional.

It is cellular.

It lives in muscles, in breath, in immune systems pushed past their limit.

And right now, I am deep inside it.

So I’m stopping.

I’m canceling what I can.

I’m letting myself be horizontal. Quiet. Unproductive.

I’m letting the grief take up space instead of forcing it back down.

This isn’t healing.

This is tending.

Listening to what my body has been trying to say for a long time.

I don’t need to be brave today.

I don’t need to make sense of anything.

I don’t need to hold anyone else.

I just need to let this move through me—

slowly, painfully, honestly.

That is all I have right now.

And it has to be enough.