When Your Body Speaks, Listen. (Sometimes)

I ignored the wisdom deep within my skin. And I very nearly remained trapped in a terrible situation.

Hi friends! I’ve been attending a local writer’s group hosted by the lovely

Maddie Allen 🐞

Once a month, we write and share short reflections based off assigned writing prompts. One of the prompts asked, “When did your body speak to you? Was it to be trusted?” The below is an expanded-upon piece based off that prompt. Thanks again, Maddie!! <3

The story contained within this piece is NOT current. It happened back in September-October of 2022, right after my long Appalachian Trail hike. I had to learn the hard way that I could, in fact, trust my gut.

It’s a damn good thing I did.

---

When I remember it now, I get sick thinking of how close I came. I almost chose to stay. To stick it out. To “follow through on my word.” To return my delicately-mended trust to someone who was, at that moment, trampling it elsewhere.

If I dwell on these details, it doesn’t take long for me to become angry. Angry at him, but maybe most of all, angry at myself. I try to be gentle, to remind myself that it’s not about self-judgement or scorning the choices of my younger, past self. After all, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Back then, I hardly knew a thing about body work or inner guidance, intuition, or deep knowing. This was my own fault. I had spent most of my life sacrificing such notions on the alter of Rationality, Logic and Objective Reality - my idols. I didn’t know that you could receive a message from your body, your vessel, a message that the rational mind might prefer to ignore.

I didn’t know how real the phrase, “trust your gut,” could prove to be, until I spent the fall of 2022 ignoring it.

But I would soon learn: the body sometimes knows what’s best.

In early September, I had returned last week from three incredible months of hiking the Appalachian Trail. One morning, I was jogging through my Baltimore suburb on a sunrise run - a habit I picked up in an attempt to cope with post-Trail depression. The air smelled of crispy, falling leaves. The morning was chilly, but the sunrise was gradually raising the temperature. By all accounts, it was a picture-perfect morning.

Except for the discontent I could feel, lodged unshakable in my stomach.

Get out, my gut murmured.

Shut up, I snapped in reply. You’re being paranoid.

Get out, my gut urged, louder this time, as I unlocked the front door of my new apartment. I felt another jolt of uneasiness ignite the moment I stepped inside. If failure had a stench, my apartment reeked of it. Turning up my earbuds, I tried to drown out my edginess and sat down to begin my workday.

Since my return last week, my partner and I had been trying to “work things out,” something we had agreed to do the day I set out for my hike. But “working things out” wasn’t going so well. I’d been having a hard time regaining my trust in him and in our shattered relationship. As much as I tried to deny it, there was something deep and resonant within my churning stomach telling me things were not adding up, that something was off.

I began my daily tasks of checking client emails, pumping out marketing material and revisiting design requests. As I worked, I chugged some coffee and tried again to push aside my dread, my own best censor. I turned as always, to blaming myself: “oh, this is your fault; you’re being sensitive. On Trail, you had unlimited freedom and no one to make demands on your time. That’s why you’re chafing at his controlling attitude and newly-clingy tendencies, you see! You’re not in the woods anymore. He’s right, you need to get over yourself.”

In his own special way, my partner would encourage me to come around to his way of thinking. He insisted that my hesitation was born from the trauma of him throwing me out of our shared apartment when he’d asked for that break in March. He insisted I needed to “move on” from what he’d done. He insisted I needed to “do the work.” The guy insisted on a lot of things.

A week later, we went on an afternoon walk in the park. The flat trail meandered beside a half-empty stream. The air was rich with the earthy smell of autumn leaves, but I was too busy rehashing the same-ol’ same ol’ to appreciate the beauty around me. He apologized again for initiating the break, begging me to reconsider and put the past behind us. In the same breath, he recited a litany of my sins; all the things that led to him asking for the break, and all the things I needed to work on if we had any hope of restoring our relationship to our happy status quo: me being content to follow him - puppy-like - wherever he went, me being content to tolerate his racist parents’ overt mistreatment towards me. Me being content to tolerate…far more than my share of grievances.

When he made the mistake of pushing too hard into these areas, something ignited in my chest. RUN, it screamed. This time, I listened. Seeing red, I turned and began running back to the car. Not the best idea in jeans and sandals, and not the most desirable or mature reaction to begin with. After all, I was quite literally running away from my problems.

A few more weeks slipped by, most of it spent trying to navigate the confusing discord of my body sensing what my mind was trying to ignore. We “made up” from our incident in the park. That’s when I left for a weekend backpacking trip in the Adirondack High Peaks with some friends from the Appalachian Trail. It was restorative and deeply needed; my hiker’s thirst to return to the woods after living in them for so long was unquenchable. I needed the smell of the pines like I needed air. Extinguishing our headlamps to gaze at the Milky Way in pitch darkness soothed my frazzled soul. Rest, my weary bones sighed, at last.

There, I felt the stirrings of wanderlust and inspiration re-igniting in my spirit as I listened to two of my friends talk about the new lives they were about to create for themselves. One was about to move across the country for the simple, profound reason that he wanted to begin anew. The other wanted to leave his home in Australia and was considering settling down in the Adirondack region of upstate New York.

That trip was a long, luscious exhale for my body and soul. Part of that rest, I suspect, was because I had no cell service. For three glorious days, I felt abject relief that I wasn’t obligated to answer my partner’s incessant texts. Get out, my gut insisted, frantic and desperate, the loudest it had ever been. You feel relief because you want to be out. Finally, once and for all, I listened.

And so, after returning from the Adirondacks, I left. I asked for a break of my own, first, to be sure I was correct about this. At the end of the break, I broke up with him officially. I had finally listened to my body and its quiet wisdom. Soon, inspired by my friends on the Adirondack trip, it spoke up again. It urged me to consider a dream I had long-buried: a move out West, a fresh start among the mountains I adored with people who shared my values and my love of the outdoors - something I was absolutely not finding in Baltimore.

In the end, I decided to go for it. (If you’re interested in the in-depth unfolding of this story, I’m writing about it all in my upcoming book.)

I cut ties with my partner for good, despite his furious protests, including his refusal to return two cheap, sentimental items from my father, his threats to burn them, and his scorn-laced demands, “what can those “mountain people” give you that I can’t?”

Driving across the barren plains of Colorado, I would learn that my ex had been cheating on me even as he urged me to trust him anew; he was dating another woman without either of us knowing. All that time – from the day he asked for our break, the entire time I was hiking on the Trail and when I returned, he had been with her…all while inexplicably attempting to win me back. I learned from an hours-long phone call with this woman that he was begging her to marry him, even as he was begging me to do the same. We exchanged screenshots and everything.

I was shocked, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Here at last was the source of his insane, controlling behavior. Here at last, I had my answers. For two months, my intuition, my soul, my body had sensed something was off, and I had silenced them all. Never again would I ignore my own deep inner knowing. On the heels of that thought came the utter relief: thank God I had listened. I was proud of myself for dumping him before I even knew about his infidelity; this too, my body had apparently sensed.

A year and a half later, I couldn’t be happier with my choice to relocate to Utah. I’ve lived among the “mountain people,” who have, in fact, given me so very much. I’m deeply in love with a man who makes me feel the way I always thought love should feel: safe, protected, adored, supported, Home.

I’ve never once regretted the choice to trust my gut.

That said, bodies can be faulty. Nervous systems, like mine - especially after a chaotic childhood and five years with my ex - can be out of whack for years or even a lifetime. This is a sad fact I’m having to face in therapy.

My internal alarm bells will ring unnecessarily if I “think someone’s mad at me.” They will ring if I need to speak publicly. They will ring when I need to express a difficult opinion.

When the alarm bells ring, I experience a cascade of somatic responses: sweating, heart racing, flashes of heat….the usual. Sometimes, spurts of anger will accompany these other signals, for anger has ever been my personal brand of protecting against pain. In those moments, I need to be able to say, “body, sit in the back seat. the mind’s got this.”

But in other situations, the mind struggles to comprehend the absurdity of reality. In September and October of 2022, I couldn’t accept that something was wrong with my ex, even though, deep down, I knew his behavior was shifty as hell. During times like these, we must rely on the deep knowing within our bones. It’s a balancing act, then, of being able to discern when a frightened nervous system is mistakenly alerting you of danger, or when danger is actually very present.

It’s a day-by-day act of tuning in: of asking ourselves, “is this authentic? Is this my truest knowing, or is this excessive fear?” It’s a beautiful, exquisite act of reconnecting to ourselves. Maybe if we gifted ourselves the permission to slow down and feel into (instead of hurry up and do), we could be spared from unnecessary troubles.

In a series of many, many emails my ex wrote me following our breakup (emails I only knew about because his other girlfriend alerted me to their existence), he declared, “You’re worthless. You will never find love again. You’re so fucking stupid and you will never be happy.”

Much to his chagrin, I can cheerfully report that I’ve never been happier - for many reasons that I might write about in a different piece. And it’s because I chose to tune in, to honor my inner knowing, to walk out of a life that no longer suited me and into a life that does.

---

Hello, reader!! Thank you so, so much for being here. <3 If you particularly loved this edition of Full of Life, perhaps you’d consider buying me a quick coffee? Your support makes my heart melt, and lets me know you find my writing worthwhile. I rather like the one-time support option, as it feels more manageable than the monthly financial commitment of a paid subscription.

All that money-stuff aside, being gifted this space in your inbox is a true honor, and I promise I will continue to deliver quality writing.

---

I am a death doula who believes in the power of sharing our stories. I help people explore their relationship with death, which inevitably includes exploring their relationship with life. I hold and honor the stories of the dead through writing unique obituaries, crafting entire memoirs, and planning bespoke funeral services. Learn more about my work and how I can help you at numbered-days.com.