That's a Stress Response

We compartmentalized the stress and ongoing trauma, flattening it into something survivable, but we nonetheless ate it for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner. We swam in that stress. We slept in it. We swallowed it in gulps. We lived through it, and we told ourselves stories of resilience, because what other choice did we have. But the body is bad at... See more

We’re especially bad at talking about it because of a collective tendency to treat ailments as personal. Sure, we can acknowledge that it takes a small village to support someone battling cancer. But what if the damn village caused the cancer? And not just one person’s cancer, or their immediate family’s, but everyone who looks like them, or lives ... See more

Until recently, there was very little understanding or acknowledgment of the physical and psychological effects of systemic racism, intergenerational trauma, and gender discrimination.

But bodies don’t gauge their stress response in comparison to other body’s hardships. They’re not logical, at least not in that way. My intense stress may have been less than others’, in other words, but that didn’t diminish how my body was internalizing it.