Prompt – A time your body knew something before your brain did
It was a nondescript Thursday that happened to be the first day of school in 2023. Not exactly a coming of age story, but a coming to terms story, which feels just as honest. I had already worked a full day before heading to teach night school. I had run that program since 2020, and it had become something steady in a world that rarely felt that way in 2023.
The previous director had been human first and an administrator second. The new director was the reverse. She did not even stay long enough to meet the night students. She dropped a bomb instead; if work was not finished that evening, everything would reset. A summer of effort flattened into a policy announcement delivered like a weather report. Bitch felt like a compliment in that moment.
I had been carrying an immense amount of stress in the weeks leading up to this. My mother decided to move from her home of thirty years in the Boston area to here. I was not prepared for the trauma that move would awaken in me. I slipped back into first family mode, trying to please and appease so stress would stay low, as if my father might still explode even though he was no longer in the picture. I had not lived like that since I was seventeen, yet my body slid right back into the role with muscle memory.
I had built something beautiful with my wife and children, yet I allowed myself to be pulled apart again. I tried to hold everything at once. I tried to make sure my mother had no stress. I tried to make sure my wife did not say anything that might upset her. I tried to manage my children, my work, and myself, all while carrying mistrust that never fully healed after my mother stopped speaking to me at thirteen. She moved down to be with my family, yet never truly showed up for my kids. She was doing the same to them as she did to me. Old wounds did not reopen quietly. They tore.
So on that Thursday, after the new director left without meeting the night students, the storm began. Not loud at first. Just pressure in the air. One second I stood in front of my students explaining new expectations, and the next my chest tightened as if invisible hands were testing the limits of my lungs. My breath turned shallow, not because I forgot how to breathe, but because breathing felt like pulling air through a straw that kept collapsing.
Sweat crept down my back. Voices blurred into white noise. The room grew louder and farther away at the same time. My heart pounded like it was trying to outrun memories I had spent years pretending were settled. Heat climbed up my neck. Every nerve decided to clock in at once. There was a strange clarity inside the chaos; my body moved with certainty while my mind stood still, lost several steps behind.
Time stretched thin. My hands went cold. Thoughts scattered like papers thrown into the wind. The urge to escape grew louder than my lesson, so I slipped into the bathroom. Shame narrated every step, whispering that my students could see every crack in me. I stood in front of the mirror and waited. Breath returned first. The white noise softened. My shoulders dropped. And that was only the beginning. It happened three more times that night. Then five days followed where waves of panic stacked on top of each other like surf that refused to break. ER visits. Monitors. Doctors telling me my blood pressure sat at stroke level while I sat there convinced my heart was failing. Medication meant to help triggered an anaphylactic reaction instead. My body did not whisper anymore. It screamed.
Looking back now, the panic was not betrayal. It was translation. My body spoke a language I had ignored for years; exhaustion, alcohol, pressure, grief, silence, and anger. The brain argued for productivity while the body demanded survival. That week forced a reckoning I could not outwork or outthink.
The truth is uncomfortable. My body knew I was unhealthy long before I ever said it out loud. It knew I needed to stop drinking, stop running, and stop carrying responsibility for wounds that were never mine to hold and never my fault to begin with. My body understood that survival required more than performance. It required change. Panic did not arrive to destroy me. It arrived to interrupt the myth I had built around strength. Strength was never the ability to push through trauma as if it were proof of worth. It was the moment I finally stopped long enough to hear the quieter voice inside me, the one that had been trying to pull me back toward myself long before everything began to crack.
Muddled Soma 