Why Your Body Knows First
It was 7:42 PM on a Tuesday and I was standing in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s in Park Slope, Brooklyn, holding a basket with exactly one item — a jar of almond butter, $6.99, the dark roast kind — when my hands started shaking.
Just my hands. Not the rest of me. Just this weird tremor in my fingers that made the jar rattle against the metal shelf divider every time I breathed.
I looked down at it. “What are you doing,” I said, kind of under my breath.
The woman in front of me turned around. I pretended I was on the phone.
But my body wasn’t done with me.
My chest went tight. Not pain-tight, not “I’m having a heart attack” tight — just squeeze-tight. The way you feel when someone you love walks out of a room and you can’t say why you care so much. Except nobody was walking out of any room. I was in a grocery store. I was holding almond butter. The fluorescent lights were doing that flicker they always do in Trader Joe’s.
I paid. Walked out into the cold. Got in my car.
And I sat there for like 11 minutes before I could turn the key.
That was the loudest my body had ever been. But it wasn’t the first time it tried.
I want to tell you about the years before the Trader Joe’s moment. Because that moment wasn’t random. It was built. It was the third broken filling and the Sunday eye pressure and the stomach thing at work and every email I answered when I should have been in bed.
Let me rewind.
For three years before that Tuesday, every Sunday night around 11 PM, I’d get this pressure behind my left eye. Not even pain. Pressure. Like someone was gently leaning their thumb against the back of my eyeball from the inside of my skull.
I’d rub it. I’d say “weird.” And then I’d open my laptop and answer one more email.
One more email.
That was my answer to every signal my body sent for three years straight. One more email. One more episode. One more drink with this friend who I already knew was bad for me. One more swipe through the dating apps I’d uninstalled and reinstalled twice that month.
My therapist — her name is Maya, she has an office on Union Street, she charges $140 a session and she is worth every single cent — kept saying “your body knows first.”
I thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. Like, what does that even mean? My body? Knowing things? Before my brain?
I was so sure my brain was the smart one.
It took me a long time to realize my brain is actually a moron. Like, an idiot. A complete fool. My brain can justify anything. My brain can talk me into staying at a party I want to leave, into a relationship that’s been dead for six months, into a job that’s hollowing me out, into one more drink when I already said I was done.
My body is the honest one. My body is the one that’s been screaming this whole time.
But I wasn’t hearing it.
I wasn’t hearing it on Thanksgiving at my mom’s house in Westport, Connecticut, where my brother Marcus brought his girlfriend Priya who is genuinely, truly lovely and I could not stop clenching my teeth the entire long weekend. I broke a filling Friday night on a piece of crusty bread.
“What happened to your face?” my mom asked Saturday at lunch.
“I grind my teeth,” I said.
“Do you want me to call Dr. Rinaldi? He’s still in Westport, you know.”
“Mom, I broke a filling. It’s not a whole thing.”
But it was a whole thing. It was the third broken filling in 14 months. My dentist — Dr. Pham in the Village, $220 for a cleaning without insurance, plus the broken-filling surcharge which I think is criminal — had been gently suggesting a night guard for two years.
He tells me every time. “Have you thought about the night guard?” And I go “yeah, totally, next month.” It’s been next month for two years straight.
I called Jess that week. Jess is my friend from college who lives in Astoria and tells me things I don’t want to hear.
“He tells me every time,” I told her.
“And?”
“And I just keep saying next month.”
Silence.
“You know what I think?” she said.
“What.”
“I think you’re the kind of person who feels things in your body but never believes them. Like, you’ll believe your brain over your body every single time. Even when your body is screaming.”
I was sitting on my fire escape when she said that. The wind was doing that thing where it comes up off the East River and smells like cold metal. I wanted to argue.
I didn’t.
I didn’t because she was right. And I think I knew she was right before she said it.
I think I knew it when I was 22 and I kept getting these stomach things before big meetings at the marketing job I had right out of college. I’d be in the bathroom at work and my stomach would just… lock up. Like someone had reached in and twisted. And I’d come out of the stall and splash water on my face and walk into the meeting and say “I’m fine.”
My body knew first.
It knew about the boyfriend I stayed with for an extra eight months after I should have left. It knew about the job offer I took in 2019 even though every cell in my body said no. (That job, by the way, was the one with the Sunday eye pressure. So, like, my body had been sending that signal for three years before I finally listened.) It knew about the friend who kept making me feel small but I kept meeting for brunch. It knew about the apartment in Crown Heights with the radiator that clanged all night — I moved out six months in because my body just wouldn’t let me sleep anymore.
It knew about the move from Bed-Stuy to the East Village, which was supposed to be an upgrade but felt like a betrayal of my body for about a year.
Every single time, the same story.
My brain would say “stay.”
My body would say “go.”
And I’d choose my brain.
Why? I think about that a lot. Why did I keep choosing the brain that was lying to me?
I think it’s because believing my body felt like giving up control. Like if I admitted I felt sick, I’d have to actually do something about it. And doing something about it meant changing something. And changing something meant I had to admit the thing I was doing wasn’t working.
That’s a lot of admitting.
So instead I just kept going. Drink more coffee. Take more Advil — the 200mg kind, two at a time, on the days the Sunday eye pressure turned into Monday headache. Push the workout to 6 AM even though my body was begging for sleep. Cancel the doctor appointment. Cancel, cancel, cancel.
Cancel my body.
That’s what I was doing. I was canceling my own body.
And then one morning in March I was at the gym. Equinox in SoHo, $245 a month, which I keep paying even though I go like twice a week now. I had dragged myself there at 5:45 AM because I’d told my trainer Chris I’d be there and Chris charges $95 a session so missing felt like flushing money.
I was on the treadmill. Speed 5.5. Incline 3. Watching some reality TV on the screen in front of me. And I just stopped.
Not slowed down. Stopped. Mid-stride. Just stood there with the belt moving under me.
Chris came over. He’s a patient guy. He’s been with me for two years.
“You okay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And then I started crying on a treadmill at 5:47 AM with three other people in the gym pretending very hard not to look at me.
I went home. I didn’t shower. I sat on my bed with my shoes still on.
I called Maya’s office. The earliest they had was two weeks out. I took it.
In the meantime, I did this thing Maya had told me to do like six months before that I had completely ignored.
She said: “When you feel something in your body, just write down what you felt and what was happening.”
I had rolled my eyes. “Like a journal?”
“Like a note. It doesn’t have to be more than one line.”
So I started doing it. In the Notes app. Whenever I’d feel something — a knot in my stomach, a tightness in my chest, a flutter behind my ribs that I couldn’t name — I’d type it.
Stuff like:
“3:15 PM. Chest tight. Just got off the call with mom. She asked about Marcus again. (Marcus is my brother. She asks about him every call. He has a baby. She wants me to have a baby. I do not want to have a baby right now. Or maybe ever. I’m not sure. But I do not want to be asked about it.)”
“9:42 PM. Stomach. Ate Thai food, yes. But also — saw the texts from H. (H is someone I dated for four months last year. He texts me once every three weeks like nothing happened. I always respond. I should not always respond. But I do.)”
“6:18 AM. Jaw. Woke up clenching. Dream was about my old apartment in Bed-Stuy. The radiator was clanging in the dream. I think my body is telling me I’m not over the move. (I moved out of Bed-Stuy in 2023. It is now 2026.)”
“11:04 PM. Pressure behind left eye. Sunday again. Did not answer the email. Did not open the laptop. Wrote this note instead.”
Pages of these. Just feelings and what was happening.
You know what I noticed?
My body was right every time.
Every single entry. The chest was right when I was mad at my mom for the baby thing. The stomach was right when I shouldn’t have texted H back. The jaw was right when I hadn’t actually processed the move. The Sunday eye pressure was right that I was running on empty.
Every single time.
I just wasn’t listening.
Then came the Trader Joe’s night. The shaking hands. The almond butter. The 11 minutes in my car.
That was two weeks after I started writing those notes. It wasn’t the first time my body had screamed at me. It was just the first time I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it.
I sat in that car for 11 minutes and the only thing I could think was: oh. There you are. I’ve been ignoring you for years.
I didn’t drive anywhere that night. I sat there until the shaking stopped.
Then I went home and ate the almond butter with a spoon, standing in my kitchen, and I didn’t feel great about it. But I felt like I was at least, finally, in the same room as myself.
I want to tell you something the body knows that I didn’t want to hear.
Listening to your body doesn’t fix anything.
It just makes you able to live with yourself.
That’s the part nobody told me. I thought if I listened, things would change. The relationship would end. The job would quit. The friend would fall away. And they would. They have. Some of them.
But the listening doesn’t make it feel better. It just makes it feel honest.
I still clench my jaw. I still ignore the stomach thing sometimes. Last week I got a text from H and I responded in like nine seconds.
But the morning after Trader Joe’s, I emailed Dr. Pham and I booked the night guard. $385. Not covered by insurance. I told him I wanted it. He said “I’ve been waiting two years to hear that.”
I’ve been wearing it for four months now. I clench less. I sleep better. I don’t love how it looks. I don’t love that I needed it.
The Sunday eye pressure still happens. Sometimes I open the laptop anyway. Sometimes I don’t.
The difference is I notice now.
I notice.
The fire escape in the East Village is where I sat when Jess told me what I already knew. The car in Park Slope is where my hands shook. The gym at 5:47 AM is where I cried on a treadmill. The notes in my phone are where my body got to talk, finally.
That’s not a lesson. I don’t have a lesson.
I have a jaw that aches on Wednesdays and a friend who tells me things I don’t want to hear and a $385 night guard that lives in a little case on my nightstand.
I have a body that knew first.
I have a body that was always right.
I’m just starting to be in the same room as it.
Tags: [“Body Awareness”, “Anxiety Recovery”, “NYC Memoir”, “Therapy Notes”, “Personal Essay”]