What My Body Remembers

 To this day, I still have no conscious memory of what happened to me as a toddler.

I don’t have a story I can tell.

I don’t have pictures in my mind.

I don’t have details.

And yet, I know that little girl.

She was the good little girl.

The same little girl who showed up in that doctor’s office.

The little girl who learned to be still.

To cooperate.

To tolerate.

To not make trouble.

Something about those treatments seemed to reach into a place that had been buried for nearly seventy years.

I believe trauma from my past was being stirred.

And my nervous system began to respond.

It became increasingly dysregulated, and what followed has been the most painful experience of my life.

I won’t describe the pain here.

I don’t need to.

What matters is where I feel it.

It is in the very place where I believe the abuse happened.

And that makes it almost impossible to escape.

I can’t leave my body.

I can’t walk away from that place.

Everywhere I go, I take it with me.

For so long, I thought my body was betraying me.

Now I am beginning to wonder if my body is remembering something my mind cannot.

Maybe it isn’t trying to hurt me.

Maybe it is trying to tell me:

Something happened here.

And perhaps the little girl who had no voice then is finally being given one now.