What my Body Knows about this World

I know what my body, mind, and spirit need.
I need to be outside most of the day. I need real food. I need to work and play with people who really know me, and whom I really know.

Do you know how badly I want that?
It lives in my body like hunger.

And yet every day, I live almost the exact opposite of that life.

I wake up wanting sunlight, but not being able to tolerate its brightness. I want nature more than anything, but nature overwhelms me. I am autistic. The very things that are natural to being human often feel impossible or punishing to me. Even the things that heal me come with a cost.

I’m eating a lot of frozen meals even though I fucking hate them. I don’t have the energy to cook. I never have. I think constantly about how much better my relationship with myself would be if I were eating grilled meat, nutrient-dense nourishment, warm meals that feel like care. I crave cooked vegetables. I know what my body wants. I just can’t always give it what it’s asking for.

My husband has to work out of state because that job pays him so much better than anything around our town. We all hate this arrangement because our family feels incomplete the entire time he’s gone. None of us are as well cared for as we are when we’re together. We eat worse. We sleep worse. I unravel in small, frightening ways.

But we need money to live. So we endure it. We accept this separation because the world makes it feel necessary. And every time he leaves, I’m reminded how much of my survival depends on love being physically near.

My two-year-old gets almost everything I have. She keeps me in good spirits, and she deserves my best. But it means I have very little left.

I live with my mom, dad, and brother. I love them deeply. We’re all doing our best inside a life none of us really chose.I think about them all day. I’m aware that anything could happen to us at any time, and I don’t want to take a single moment for granted. And still—I don’t reach out much. I consider it so many times a day, and can’t think of what to say. Being an autistic girl in survival mode taught me to disappear. Closeness once meant confusion and overwhelm. My body remembers that. So now I live inside a contradiction: wanting intimacy, and being afraid of it.

I have my phone in my hand pretty much all day. I use it to order groceries because my body lives so deeply in a freeze state that I’ve never been able to safely drive a car. That limits me in ways that are both practical and invisible, and it hurts my spirit more than I know how to explain. Because of that, this glowing rectangle I resent the shit out of has become essential to my survival. I use it to Google all my weird body symptoms—and, honestly, it really helps.

Throughout the day I think about calling my one friend, but I don’t. My energy feels heavy in a way that feels contagious. I don’t want it to be so obvious I’m depressed every time we talk. It feels like an aura I can’t turn off—because it’s also a true thing about me.

When my daughter goes to bed, you already know I watch reality TV for a few hours. Sometimes I enjoy it. But most of the time, I don’t. It’s just the only way I know how to keep myself company without asking too much of myself.

When I finally lie down, I become more aware of all the pain and trauma stuck in my body after so many years of having no idea how to take care of myself. Stillness isn’t peaceful yet. It’s disturbing. It makes it incredibly hard not to organize my identity around being someone things happened to.

And that’s where work enters the picture.

I work on a laptop and a phone. Writing feels good. Making myself post feels like torture—like going against myself, like performing when my body is begging to be quiet.

But I do it anyway, because I can’t work a normal job. I can’t find one that won’t destroy me. So I try to build something on my own. I know I can. That’s why I keep going. That’s why I hashtag my pain. LOL.

I sell pieces of myself to an algorithm in a world run by billionaires, where our attention is mined and sold. It feels like our entire species has been quietly downgraded—trained to choose scrolling and isolation over real life, over each other, almost every time. I find that heartbreaking. I find it soul-crushing.

And it isn’t just my own life that exhausts me. When there’s news like a new ICE station opening in my town, a big part of me wants to dissociate just to make it through the day and take care of my daughter without collapsing. I know the privilege in that. I’m not the one being brutalized. And still, my body feels the weight of what’s happening. It’s beyond disorienting to realize how thin the line is between “this is unimaginable” and “this is already beginning.” I carry guilt for being safe, grief for those who aren’t, and a visceral sense of panic about the world my daughter is inheriting. I feel unfit to guide her through it. I feel so not okay. Am I just supposed to pretend I can handle it in front of her?

And then I open my phone and see a different world entirely. I see people online living the life I dream of. Slow mornings. Forests. Community. Freedom. I feel so physically jealous, but I know the truer feeling is a bottomless grief.

There are so many moments in a single day when I feel myself wanting to expand. I meet a wall. I have no money for the small sparks that come to me: What if we went camping? What if we just left for a few days? We can’t. And the wanting doesn’t stop.

Every day I am aware of the trap. Every day I try, in tiny ways, to break it.

I am not lazy.
I am not ungrateful.

I am not broken.

I am a human animal trying to remember what kind of world my body was built for—inside a system that forgot.

I’m sharing this in case you’re trying to remember too. We’re not alone!