Symptoms Are Signals, Not Malfunctions

Every woman I work with has some version of the drawer.

A dress. A pair of jeans at the back of the closet. A photograph she keeps as evidence. Something she has decided she is not currently qualified to be.

Mine was a swimsuit ~ and the ritual I ran around it every spring taught me more about my body than twenty years of plans ever did. What follows is a passage from The Reclaim Pathway: A Journey Back to You out winter of 2027.

The ritual I ran every spring

Every spring, I took the swimsuit out of the drawer.

I would hold it up. Look at it. Look at me. And put it back.

Not yet. First the plan. First the six weeks of being good. First the cutting back, the cleaning up, the earning of the body that would be allowed to wear it. The swimsuit was not clothing. It was a reward I had not yet qualified for.

That was the whole ritual, and I ran it for years without ever questioning it. The same cycle, every spring: the body got assessed. It got a project. It got handed its targets and told, kindly but firmly, that it could rejoin my life once it had been corrected. I treated it exactly the way I had treated an underperforming employee ~ set the goal, set the performance review, the metrics to perform better, withhold the approval until the numbers were green.

And every spring, the project worked a little less.

The same effort returned less. The body that used to snap back didn't. And I read that, the way I had been trained to, as the body failing harder ~ which meant the discipline had to come down harder. More restriction. More pressure. More white-knuckling toward a version of myself that kept getting further away no matter how good I was.

It did not once occur to me that the body might be saying something.

That it had been saying it for a while.

That it was getting louder precisely because I kept not listening.

What if it isn't broken

So let me ask you the question that turned me around.

What if the weight, the fog, the exhaustion, the symptom you have been at war with ~ what if none of it is a malfunction at all? What if it is a message? And what if it has been getting louder the same way any voice gets louder when it has been talked over for years?

Symptoms are not malfunctions. They are messages. The body is not breaking down. It is communicating ~ in the only language it has left, which is sensation.

What we have asked our bodies to absorb

Decades of diet culture. The cycle of restriction and rebound, the plan and the failure and the next plan. Years of overriding hunger, ignoring fatigue, pushing past the quiet signal that said enough. Every single time you talked yourself out of what your body was telling you, you taught it the same lesson: your signals do not get answered here.

You did not lose touch with your body because something is wrong with you.

You lost touch with it because, for years, not feeling was the only way to keep going.

Why the signals come back all at once

Some of what you are feeling genuinely needs medical attention, and that is exactly where it belongs ~ your doctor first, always. But a great deal of it is something else entirely. It is your body's response switching back on after years in the dark.

You do not need a better protocol. You have had a hundred protocols.

You need to stop treating the messenger like the problem.

The body is not asking to be corrected. It is asking to be heard.

Reconnection is the opposite of fixing

That is the end of the excerpt. Here is why I chose this one.

The woman reading this is usually excellent at fixing things. It is most of what she has been rewarded for. Hand her a broken system and she will diagnose it, resource it, and turn it around, and she will do it while everyone else is still describing the problem.

So when her own body starts sending signals, she does the only thing she knows how to do.

She opens a project.

And reconnection is not a softer kind of fixing. It is the opposite of fixing. Fixing assumes something is wrong with the body. Reconnection assumes something is right with it ~ that it is doing exactly what a faithful messenger does, and has been all along.

The swimsuit was never the issue. The drawer was never the issue. The issue was that I had spent decades in a relationship with my body where it only got to speak through symptoms, because symptoms were the only volume loud enough to reach a woman who had stopped listening to anything quieter.

The question to carry this week

If your loudest symptom could finish the sentence I have been trying to tell you ~ what do you already suspect it would say?

You do not have to do anything about the answer. That is the practice. Most of us have never once let the body finish a sentence.

The Reclaim Pathway: A Journey Back to You. arrives this winter. The deeper work lives in The Reclaim Room.