Who Else Is Feeling This In Their Body
Take each other's sorrow seriously — that includes your own
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I keep coming up with new stories to explain it away: it snowed and wouldn’t melt and it was a nightmare to walk the dogs. It’s winter, and it’s seemingly never not been so. You’re deep in the writing process, it’s always this way. Your partner is gone on a long trip. You’re lifting a lot. It’s very cold. You can’t garden. You hate your winter clothes. Those winter boots don’t have enough ankle support. Your stabilizing muscles are in overdrive, of course your lower back hurts. You’re at the most annoying point in your cycle. You’re a woman in your 40s, of course your sleep is shit. Your fun weekend plans were canceled, that’s always demoralizing.
These are all half-lies, half-truths: stories I tell myself, stories you’ve probably told yourself, too, at some point in your life or especially over the last eight years, as you’ve attempted to become or endure as a person with resilience. Resilience means enduring. It also means absorbing a whole lot of excess shit in your body — in your hair, in your back, in your joints — in ways you can’t always understand.