The Body Remembers
This is a reflection for myself, and perhaps for anyone else who has spent years carrying more than their body could safely hold.
For a long time, I believed that if I worked hard, helped others, stayed active, and stayed useful, everything inside me would stay manageable. And for a long time, it did. I moved cities, changed countries, served in complex roles, and stayed resilient. I kept going.
But recently, my body asked me to stop, or more truthfully, to finally listen. After experiencing Covid this May, a series of quiet symptoms made it impossible to ignore: my left ear stopped hearing clearly, my nose stopped smelling, my energy drained after speaking, my mind lost words under pressure, and my heart felt tired, even after full nights of sleep.
I have recently started reading the book The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. My entire experience resonates deeply with the core ideas of this book. Faced with my recent health problems, I assumed I was just stressed. But it’s deeper than that. It’s my body keeping the score.
Van der Kolk wrote for people exactly like me, people who are high-functioning, thoughtful, deeply engaged with others’ pain, but who have stored trauma in their bodies in ways that no blood test or scan can easily explain.
Dr. Van der Kolk’s central message is this:
“Trauma is not just an event, it’s an imprint left on the brain, body, and nervous system.”
From early traumatic events, childhood illness, adverse experiences, or simply the emotional labor of being an ambitious student or a successful professional, our nervous system has been doing what it had to: keeping us alive, alert, prepared, and adaptable. But over time, the system that helped us survive can become overloaded.
Even with support, supervision, or therapy, the body holds on. The Body Keeps the Score emphasizes:
“The rational brain can’t talk the emotional brain out of its own reality”
Even when we understand our story intellectually, the body may still hold tension, immune dysfunction, fatigue, breathing changes, or shut down in the face of subtle threats. As I go through the book, I see also my own symptoms more clearly, and I begin to understand them not as weakness or threat, but as communication and reminder of care.
Healing, van der Kolk explains, happens when we move from reaction to reconnection with our bodies, our inner sensations, and with safe relationships.
A body that has carried too much for too long will eventually speak, sometimes through illness, sometimes through stillness. Many survivors of illness, trauma, or burnout describe this as a moment of reckoning, or even of recreation.
To those reading this, I would say this. If you feel exhausted, forgetful, detached, or overwhelmed, it is not because you’re weak. It is because your body is strong enough to keep going without rest. You are not alone.
We are not alone and we are not broken. We are people whose bodies are asking for care in a new language. I don’t have all the answers yet. I only wish to stop pushing and start listening. And that, I believe, is where real healing begins.