What The Body Knows
The forgotten art of living life for the feeling, not the performance
I have been performing a version of myself nearly my whole life, and my body has felt it the whole time. Many of you may also know this feeling.
It’s not that I have not been insincere in my performance, but I have lived an exaggerated version of truth. The woman who pranced and posed and altered the pitch of her voice to fit neatly into the performance expected of her is not not me, but it’s also not all of me.
The truth is I have felt squished, compressed, and restrained by the increasingly uncomfortable mold to which I can no longer conform. I have tried so hard to contain what simply is not meant to be contained. So I’m setting it free.
The truth is I do not fit, and it’s not just that I do not fit anymore, but I never did. I never fit in, and finally, I no longer want to. I have been holding myself in to the point of combustion, ever building pressure to release, to expand, to embody the fullness of my essence, but always, I found myself time and time again, withdrawing force, reigning back, and forcing a veil upon the truth of my light.
I wound up settling for a projection that was more palatable, more acceptable, more in step with everyone else — but that is a lie, and I am no longer willing to tell it.
This expression was not dishonest, it was initiated from somewhere real. But it was only ever one dimension of what is far more layered. The deeper I pushed the completeness of it down, the harder it fought to surface, breaking through in sharp, jagged fragments that interrupted the illusion of an otherwise smooth storyline.
I have been creating a pretty, albeit predictable picture of a good life, but the better I got at coloring inside the lines, the more I began to mistake my life as a reflection of anyone else’s. And I am bored of this.
Dance, monkey, dance. The world and its chorus demands of us. So we do, until we fall out of rhythm with the music we cannot even hear and we try to step to a beat of our own. Maybe the reason you no longer dance is not because you got old or never learned how but because your body simply refused the performance.
My body has always known what my mind could not afford to admit. So lost inside the performance, so busy with preparing the next act, my mind has no space to admit the truth that had been hiding, unacknowledged, but deeply felt. This is not it.
My body always knew. My bones ache with the urge to grow into their strength. My muscles quiver with anticipation for the opportunity to initiate the larger expression my body has been craving. My limbs lick the edges of all the space I yearn to claim as I stretch in preparation to carry myself, more whole and authentic, in my true range.
Not everything, of course, will need to be shown and shared. The best bits are always withheld as the delicious secrets they are. Yet from these private treasures, the spark starts an undeniable momentum that will not be contained for any pretty packaged belonging, nor roaring approval, nor thunderous applause.
I belong to me now in a way that no longer needs all that — of course, I like it, but it’s nothing to live for.
I am layered, complex, and often in contradiction, but that’s a happy paradox that is not a problem to resolve or explain, only held up and celebrated as the courageous act of seeking truth I don’t yet know.
You might feel this too, long before you become brave enough to know it. Or maybe, like me, you have decided that the show is over, that it’s time to wrap up production without offering any clean conclusion, that you are done mistaking performance for living. Maybe you have also decided that it’s time to live a different life.
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Indeed, Sir Shakespeare, we are often our closest reflection of self in play. But I have found myself between acts, and while you are welcome to perform, As You Like It, I simply must create a life that is more than a repetitive performance. I cannot exist for one that is predictable and ultimately, pointless.
This does not mean that I will not perform again, but that right now, my body demands to touch other dimensions of existence more deeply. I long to experience different forms of expression free from the narrative of what’s expected from someone who follows the script and stays confined to the container or restricted to the cage.
I desire to move through it as someone definitively outside and entirely without. I want to exchange the domestic safety of the zoo for the raw, untamed wilderness of jungle.
I want to start to move to the sound of my own drum. I want to learn how to listen for what that even sounds like. Do you know the sound of your drums?
It will be hard to understand and confusing to most — that’s fine, encouraging even, as the oddity of living as the full paradoxical, undefined self is as intriguing as it is bewildering and mysterious. It is apt to be misunderstood. But who cares? I do not.
My body has had enough and refuses to play puppet any more. The parts I love will show up much as they always have and maybe, for all outward appearances, it would appear that nothing has changed. But what it looks like is neither my business nor concern.
Everything has changed irrevocably because now, I am devoted to living the feeling. And in this act, the curtains are crashing down as I burst, twirl, gesticulate, and leap with glee, and a shadow of uncertainty, ambivalent to the noise, committed only to moving as my bones, my body, my breath always ached for.
And how, my darling, do we find you?
🐾 Wild and well, and dancing madly, SJT
We are taught early that approval is survival. It’s no surprise that everyone is in survival mode.
We become conditioned to believe that warmth from others is oxygen. No wonder so many of us are struggling to breathe.
We think if we can just secure enough applause, enough validation, enough proof that we are seen and celebrated, then we have successfully built a life worth living. And so many have given up hope.
Some still manage to neatly organize themselves around what lands well, smoothing edges and performing the version that earns the positive response.
We live in a constant self-monitoring, ever adjusting and micromanaging every expression, collecting fleeting crumbs of approval, ever starving for the momentary rush of aliveness that comes from feeling like we are “good” enough to belong.
But the moment never lasts and soon we are on the hunt again.
What if it was all a beautiful lie, innocently inherited by well-intentioned people who contort themselves so twistedly in a false tension to secure it that they themselves forgot their original state of existence?
You don’t NEED it, you just LIKE it.
It’s a subtle shift that brings fundamental change because once you believe this, you are simply here, moving from what feels true.
You’re not outside it, but you’re not exclusively of it, and though applause and silence alike affect you differently, your attachment to what that means about you no longer applies.
It’s the difference between performing for a life and presence with one.
The body keeps the score long before the mind agrees to read it. What strikes me most here is the gap between those two timings is years, for most people and all the energy spent managing that distance rather than closing it.