Why Your Body Knows First

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11:47 PM on a Tuesday. Second bedroom of my Brooklyn apartment, the one we call “the office” but never actually work in when the sun’s out. Slack is still open. Three red dots. My chest has been tight for what feels like three hours but is probably six. I haven’t eaten since 1pm. I’m telling myself I’ll get up. I’m not getting up.

My friend Maya texts: “you good?” I stare at it for forty-five seconds. I type “yeah just tired.” I delete it. I type “kinda off today.” I delete that. I type “not really” and put the phone face down.

My body figured out something is wrong last Wednesday. My brain is still pretending it doesn’t know.

The Night I First Noticed

It was 2:14am last Wednesday. I was standing outside the bodega on Bedford Ave, the one with the cat in the window, buying a sandwich I’d already told myself I wasn’t going to buy.

A guy walked past me on the sidewalk. I don’t know him. He didn’t look at me. He was just walking, hands in his pockets, minding his business.

I flinched. Like physically flinched. Stepped back into the glass door. Shoulders up. Hands curled. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I’d lost my mind, and honestly I kind of had.

I bought the sandwich. I went home. I told myself it was just the hour. Just being tired. Just being wired.

My stomach had already started doing the thing. The clench thing. The one where you swallow and there’s a knot that doesn’t go away. By the time my head hit the pillow my palms were sweating. I don’t know what I was preparing for.

I called my therapist the next morning. She asked, “what did you notice in your body this week?”

I almost said nothing. Then I listed it out loud and it sounded insane.

Jaw clenched for the entire workday. My coworker told me I was grinding my teeth. I had no idea.
Waking up at 3:47am every night this week. Not worried about anything specific. Just awake. Just alert.
Losing feeling in my left hand on the subway, then it comes back tingling.
Forgetting to eat, then eating four slices of toast at 11pm and feeling nothing.
That pressure in my chest — like someone’s standing on it. Or like nothing at all. I can’t tell the difference.

She looked at me for a long time and said, “okay.”

That’s the therapist version of “yeah, that’s a list.”

The List You Build So You Don’t Have to Listen

Here’s the part that bothers me. I can name every reason I’m “stressed.”

My job is uncertain. My rent is too high. My mom calls every Sunday at 9am and asks if I’ve thought about doing my master’s and I say no, mom, I have. We talk for an hour about my cousin who’s getting married. My dad stopped calling after I didn’t come home for his 60th, but that’s a different newsletter.

I have a list. I’ve shown the list to people. They nod.

But the list isn’t the thing. The list is what my brain invented so my body would stop yelling at me. The list is the story I tell myself to make the chest thing make sense. The list is what I say in therapy, what I say to my friends, what I say to the woman at the bodega who asks if I’m okay because it’s 2am and I’m clearly not.

The actual thing — the thing my body already knows — is that I haven’t felt safe in months. I haven’t felt like I could put down the laptop and still be okay in the morning. I haven’t felt like I could sleep without three alarms and still wake up on time. I haven’t felt like I could fail at one thing without it meaning something about me as a person.

That’s the body knows first thing.

Your body is not stress. Your body is the answer to a question your brain hasn’t even formed yet.

I told my friend Jess this over coffee last Saturday. She got really quiet, the kind of quiet she gets when something landed, and then she said, “wait. That’s why I haven’t been able to wear my watch for two months. It makes my wrist feel like it’s being watched.”

We both laughed. Then we both got quiet again.

What It Actually Feels Like In Your Body

I want to write this part really honestly because I haven’t read it said like this anywhere and I’ve been looking.

It feels like wearing a suit of armor you forgot to take off. You walk around all day with your shoulders up. You breathe shallow. You tell people you’re fine and you smile and the smile works — the smile is convincing, you’ve been practicing this smile since you were twelve.

It feels like suffocating in a way I can’t even explain why. Some days I just stand at my desk and my palms are sweating and I don’t know what I’m preparing for. Like my body is bracing for something that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s been bracing for so long it forgot what it was bracing for.

It feels like your nervous system is running software from 2006. Everything takes longer to load. You stare at a text for nine minutes trying to figure out what tone it was sent in. You cry at a commercial about a dog. You can’t cry about the real thing.

It feels like your stomach is sending you a fax. Whatever that means. Old technology. Slow delivery. Signal’s bad but it’s still trying.

It feels like you’re carrying something invisible and it’s getting heavier but if anyone asks you say, “what thing?”

It feels like the floor under you might be thin.

It hit me like a wall on the train home last Thursday. The Q train, between DeKalb and Atlantic, packed at 7pm on a Thursday. I just started crying in public for no reason. The kind of crying where you can’t even tell you’re about to cry until you’re already doing it. I’m such a mess for forty-five seconds and then it stops and I have to wipe my face before I get off at my stop.

I called my sister on Sunday. She said, “you sound weird, are you sick?” I said no. She said, “you sound like dad before he stopped leaving the house.”

We were both quiet for like forty-five seconds. Nobody had to say anything else.

She wasn’t wrong.

Why Nobody’s Talking About It Out Loud

Here’s the part that makes me want to sit in my car and not drive anywhere.

Every person I’ve talked to about this in the last six months — twelve people, I counted yesterday — said some version of “yeah, I noticed that too.” Like it’s an open secret. Like we’ve all just never said it out loud at the same time.

I texted five of them while writing this article. “do you ever feel like your body knows something before you do?” All five responded within ten minutes. All five said yes. All five said more than yes. They said “god yes.” They said “constantly.” They said “I thought it was just me.”

It is so painfully not just me.

But here’s the part that gets me. The twelve people on my list — they all have the chest thing. They all have the stomach thing. They all have the sleeping thing. Three of them wake up at 3am too. Two of them told me they’ve started grinding their teeth so hard they cracked a filling.

And none of us are doing anything about it. We’re all sitting at our desks. We’re all saying “I’m fine, just tired.” We’re all grinding our teeth and clenching our jaws and forgetting to eat and losing feeling in our hands on the subway.

My friend Priya told me last week, “I told my doctor about the hand thing last month and she just told me to drink more water.” And there was this look on her face, this resigned look, like she’d already decided the doctor wasn’t going to help before she walked in.

I’m in it. My chest is tight right now. I don’t know why I’m writing this at 11:47pm when I have work tomorrow. I don’t know why I’m publishing it.

I just thought I should say it out loud once.

Verdict

I’m not going to tell you to take care of yourself. I don’t even know what that means anymore. If your body has been trying to get your attention for the last three months, it’s not being dramatic. Listen to it, even if your brain hasn’t caught up. And if you recognize yourself in any of this — that part where your chest won’t relax — you’re not crazy, and you are not alone.

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