The Thing Your Body Is Still Watching For

You have probably tried to calm yourself down. Most of us have, and most of us have a small collection of things that work for about an hour. The breathing. The walk. The bath, the tea, the eight hours of sleep you finally got and woke from just as tired.

None of it is wrong. It simply cannot do the job you are asking it to do.

Because a body does not stay on alert out of habit. It stays on alert because it believes something is coming, and it has not been told otherwise. And a body that cannot locate what it is bracing for has no choice but to brace for everything. That is the whole mechanism. It is not dysfunction. It is a system doing exactly what a good system does with incomplete information: watching the entire horizon, because it does not know which direction the thing comes from.

This is why the tea does not hold. You have lowered the volume without answering the question.

I lived inside this for six years without understanding it. I was composed through treatments and surgeries, capable at work, reassuring to everyone who asked, and underneath all of it something in me never once put its guard down. I thought I was managing beautifully. What I was actually doing was standing watch for a threat I had never named, which meant I could never be off duty, which meant no amount of rest was going to reach the tired part.

What changed it was not a technique. It was finding the thing.

When you locate what you have been guarding against, when you can look directly at it and say this, this is what I have been afraid of since I was small, something extraordinary happens in the body before it happens anywhere else. The shoulders come down half an inch. The breath goes lower. The jaw, which you did not know was doing anything, stops. Your system finally has a location. It can stop scanning the whole horizon and look at one place, and a threat you can look at is a threat you can survive.

That is what actual settling feels like. Not calm laid over the top of alarm. Alarm concluding, because it got its answer.

Which is why I no longer tell women to relax. I ask them what they are still watching for.

Most of them know. They just have never been asked in a room where it was safe to say it out loud.