13,870 days in this body
gratitude for the agony and the aliveness
Note: I posted a short version of this piece on my other newsletter this morning. This is the full version. Also, a content warning for suicidal ideation.
It’s my 38th birthday, and I’m feeling immense gratitude for my body. For all that it’s done for me. For the ways it’s protected me. For its ability to heal itself into more alive versions of its/my self. I’ve experienced about 13,870 days in this body. 13,870 days of learning, loving, healing, becoming, and undoing inside of it. It’s hard for my brain to make sense of that number. That’s more days than I could ever conceive of seeing. And yet, here I am, in this body.
How many of those days did I spend outside of my body, I wonder? Enough that it could accumulate in years? Decades? How many times within those days have I disregarded my body’s needs or boundaries? Or had my needs or boundaries disregarded by another?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I can at least measure the effects of those trespassings by feeling for the way my shoulders frequently try to touch my ears, or how my jaw never stops trying to clench, or how my heart can harden itself in an instant. I don’t judge these tendencies. I know that the shapes my body is trying to contract itself into are shapes of perceived safety and protection.
So, I feel grateful that I’ve learned how to soften. That feeling myself now feels safer than staying numbed. I’m grateful that the shape of my once hardened heart didn’t get stuck that way. That all the times I spent not feeling didn’t become such a ritual that I forgot how to feel at all.