you are Not broken
I wrote this for the woman still searching for someone to explain how she got here.
The diagnosis came, but the understanding didn't.
This is an invitation to know: what you've been carrying has not always been yours.
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Transcript From The Audio
I wish I had mirrors. All my life, I longed for someone to see me, validate me, and give me a map for where I was. There have been older women along the way who gave me glimpses, who held me tenderly for a moment. But I longed for one to stay, one to keep me company, consistently helping me navigate the uncharted territory of being a woman.
I know what it's like to search for her, to look for the one who can explain how you got here and why. Maybe you have her in your life. Count yourself lucky. Maybe you don't. Either way, this is an invitation to know [that] what you have been carrying has not always been yours.
Maybe you have received a diagnosis, a medical one: PCOS, endometriosis, an autoimmune condition… Or a psychological one—anxiety, depression, PTSD.
And maybe it was helpful. It opened a door. it offered language. It brought some relief, but it probably didn't ask how or why. The maps exist, medical protocols, therapeutic frameworks, [and] evidence-based treatments. But these are generic maps built from patterns and populations, not from you. Not from your specific story, your body's particular path, your origins. The diagnosis says what? But it skips. How did you get here?
“The diagnosis says what?
But it skips. How did you get here?
And for many women, this gap can be enraging.
You know something is wrong.
You ask, you advocate, you push, and you’re told everything is fine. Your labs are normal. There’s nothing wrong.
But you live in this body.
You Know [when something is not right]”
Historically, women have not been believed. They were called hysterical, dramatic, [and] oversensitive. So the tests don't get performed, the referrals don't get made, the questions don't get asked. Not because nothing is wrong, but because she is not believed. And so you're left holding a knowing you cannot get validated, a truth you cannot get help for. A body that speaks a language no one around you is willing to learn.
“That is isolating. And it is enraging. ”
The body has different ways of caring, and not all bodies carry the same way. For some women, what's carried becomes somatic. It lives in tissue, in symptoms and conditions. Medicine can name but not fully explain. The flesh speaks through pain, fatigue, inflammation, [and] dysregulation. You receive a medical diagnosis. You're handed a label, but you're rarely handed understanding.
For other women, what's carried becomes emotional and psychological. It does not show up as a diagnosis you can point to on a scan. It shows up as the weight you live with, the heaviness that has no physical location but is always there. It expresses as fear of being seen, hypervigilance, anxious or avoidant attachment, doubting your worth, low self-esteem that doesn't match your actual depth or capacity. A way of bracing against the world that you can't fully explain, but can't seem to put down.
These are not mindset issues. They are also the body carrying, but through a different channel. The emotional body, the psychological body, the part of you that absorbed what you inherited and metabolised it not into an illness, but into ways of being. Both orientations are real. Both can receive diagnoses one from a doctor, one from a therapist. Both diagnoses can offer something useful, but both leave you without a map that is truly yours.
So you're left to find your own understanding, your own relief, your own medicine, and you piece it together from western medicine, alternative methods, from books and conversations, trial and error, from the slow, painful process of listening to a body no one taught you to trust.
“ And so you navigate this alone. And you carry something that was never fully explained. And you deserve more. You deserve more than management. You deserve to be understood. ”
This can lead to frustration and frustration held long enough becomes something else.
“It becomes a quiet, simmering rage, the kind that bursts out of nowhere, that gets argumentative when you feel unseen. That turns self-righteous about certain things. Not because you’re difficult, but because they hit a nerve. The nerve of not being believed. The nerve of not being taken seriously. The nerve of having to get louder just to be heard.”
You may not even recognise it as rage at first. It may look like irritability, impatience, a sharp edge you can't soften. It may look like exhaustion that has a bitter taste underneath. It may look like tears that come out hot instead of sad.
“But it is rage.”
And it makes sense because you have been carrying something heavy, and no one has asked you about the weight.
But here is what I've seen. Rage can be awakening. The diagnosis may be a beginning, but the work of carving your own path, finding your own answers. Building your own map is infuriating, and in that fury, something shifts.
“You start to see. You see the way women have been dismissed historically and presently. You see the inequality not just in medicine, but everywhere.
You see how the world was built and on whose silence it was built. And you awaken, moving from unconscious to conscious.
Rage breaks the trance.”
The not asking: “how did you get here?” is not neutral. It is functional.
“ It keeps the authority where it always has been. Anywhere but with a woman. ”
Because if the questions were really asked if medicine and psychology truly wanted to understand how you arrived at this diagnosis, at the exhaustion, the collapse they would have to contend with more than your individual biology.
“They would have to contend with how women have been treated.
The centuries of denied knowing the way intuition has been pathologized the way women’s bodies have been tested upon without consent, the way symptoms have been dismissed as hysteria...
The way modern advancements have been built on the labour, the suppression and the silencing of women.
And acknowledging you fully means acknowledging all of it.
”
Here's what I need you to understand:
Your body has not broken down. Your body has been loyal. Loyal beyond measure. It has been carrying what could not be spoken, what could not be felt, what the life you built had no room for.
The symptoms, somatic or emotional, are not a malfunction. They are not punishment. They are not proof that something is wrong with you.
They are [an] accumulation. They are the body's language for what has been held too long in silence. The exhaustion, the collapse, the vigilance, the flares, the weight, the rage. These are not signs of a body failing. These are signs of a body that has been faithful, faithful to everything it absorbed, everything it inherited, everything it was never allowed to release. And now it is speaking not because it is broken, but because it is done being silent.
When you have learned to map out your own healing, when you've had to search for solutions that see you, validate you. Something shifts.
You shift agency back to you. You stop giving your authority away to experts, waiting for them to tell you what's wrong and how you fix it.
You still work with them, but you show up differently in that conversation. You speak from a place of intimate understanding, not just symptom reporting. You advocate from the inside of your own experience, not from a desperate plea to be believed.
It means that you are listening. Listening to what your body carries. And you become your own ally. Not an adversary to your body. Not an extension of yourself—performing, controlling, fixing from the outside. You learn to inhabit rather than manage.
This changes your relationship with your body. It begins to trust you. Your ability to be in harmony with it rather than trying to fix it, control it, [or] being aggravated by the symptoms it presents. And your body begins to talk back.
The chronic vigilance softens. You start making choices that honor your body: movement, nourishment, rest… not from a place of fixing, but from a place of care.
“This does not mean the diagnosis disappears. It means you stop giving it power. It stops being your whole story and starts to become the beginning of a different one. ”
Dysregulation still comes. Inflammation still flares. But you have tools. You have agency. You are in relationship with your body as an active participant, not a passive watcher. And this changes you.
This transformation touches other aspects of your life. Suddenly, the relationships that required you to be a lesser version of yourself, accommodating, low self-esteem, the fixer, the pleaser, are also reassessed.
It can be lonely to choose to trust yourself. It can be painful to lose the people you love simply because you have chosen to live within your truth, to embody you; you may have to grieve what you wished for and did not get. And you most certainly have to hold and forgive the version of you that came before.
“But here is what I’ve found, and what I believe you’ll find too. Confirmation does not come only through proof. It comes through coherence. ”
The more you true you become to yourself, the more the world reflects that truth back. You name something silently and someone else says it out loud. That's not coincidence. That's coherence.
Staying coherent within yourself brings peace. You stop abandoning yourself to keep others comfortable. That is the beginning of transformation.
The body is not the problem. The body has been has been a faithful witness. The question is not: “What is wrong with me?” The question is: What has my body been carrying, and what does it need me to finally understand? The question is: “What has my body been carrying, and what does it need me to finally understand?”
You're not broken. You're not lost. You're not too much. You're not imagining it.
You've been carrying something real. Something that deserves to be seen, traced and understood, not managed. Met. And you will not always be alone in it.
*Images sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*