11/06/2025
There are certain times each year when I’d feel off. Angry, sad, sensitive for no clear reason (some might’ve even suggested that I was an oversensitive bitch.) these times affected me greatly with zero awareness of why.
For a long time, I brushed it off as stress or hormones or upcoming life changes like the end of the school year (but, let’s not deny that that one is a real mindf**k.)
And….trauma leaves imprints that don’t follow the calendar, it follows the soma.
Neuroscience calls it stored implicit memory.
TCM calls it qi stagnation or a “knot”.
Energy work calls it blocked or trapped emotion.
Different languages, same message: the past lives in the body until it’s witnessed and released.
For me, one of those times comes every May - the month my mother died when I was two, and of course Mother’s Day (often falling within 5 days of one another.)
I have no memory of her death, but my body remembers. It’s soooo heavy. My body starts to feel the sluggish tension toward the end of April. The weight of everyone else grief, the expectation that I be “cuddly just like Betty bear.” My own grief and rage.
In recent years I started to honour it. To set a reminder in my phone. Take a few days off. To allow the grief to land, to sit with it and release it.
I share the importance of these acts with you to remind you that It’s not indulgence 🩷 it’s intelligence. We’ve all been through difficult experiences in life, and there’s never value in comparing them.
But I wonder if you take stock of your past year, and years beyond that, if you can observe some pattering around transformative, traumatic, or painful experiences in your life. And perhaps the most human thing you can do for yourself is to create space. Give permission.
Because when you start listening to your body, you realize it’s not wrong. I wasn’t wrong for being a hot mess every May. I was never taught how to grieve and worse, there was always an expectation that it would interfere with life & productivity.
I wrote in more detail about this in my latest email.
DM me if you want access. 🩷