I Still Have Moments Where My Body Becomes More Obedient Than Free

Dear Delyara, That is trauma for me in everyday form. Not always flashbacks or obvious triggers. Sometimes it is just a body that knows how to shrink quickly. How to go compliant. How to become careful, polite, anticipatory, emotionally inexpensive when a room starts feeling wrong in a way it cannot yet fully explain. I notice it most afterwards. How quickly I softened. How little space I took. How my voice changed. How I moved around someone else’s mood as if it were weather and my job was not to get struck by it. That knowledge is painful. Because it shows me how old patterns still enter present rooms through my body before my mind gets to vote. I am freer than I was. I know that. I am not fully free in every room yet. That truth deserves saying too.