Acting On What You Know

Something in me kept pulling at the surface. Not enough to break me open. Just enough to interrupt the flow of my day. I tried to stay cool through it. Keep moving. Keep speaking from the version of myself that knows how to hold everything together. But my body wasn’t cooperating. It grew heavy in quiet moments. Certain conversations drained me before they even started. My chest tightened around things my mouth kept calling “fine.” And I caught it. Not the feeling. The split. The distance between what I was saying and what I was carrying. I am tired of carrying things that are not mine to carry. That’s the part I usually walk past.

The body whispers. I explain it away. The body tightens. I call it stress. The body pauses. I force movement anyway. But this time I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it. So I stopped negotiating with myself. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just small moments of honesty. Turning things down. Sitting longer in silence. Admitting when something felt off instead of dressing it up in positivity. And strangely enough, the more honest I became, the less lost I felt. Because deep down, I already knew. My body had been carrying the truth long before my mind was willing to hold it.

Prompt: What truth keeps returning to your body, even when you try to move past it?