I wait. And I wait. For a cure. A miracle. A medicine. A romantic partner. I wait for pain relief and physical ease. I wait for an answer. For a placebo that convinces me to wake up the potential in my body for joy and regeneration.

Let me become a doorway so big and so open that a new way of being can emerge, one not tied to the fiction of human supremacy.

If I can’t close my sensory gating, then open me wider. Dilate me like a cervix so that I may be the birth canal for stories that are not about human beings and human progress.

Trauma does not belong to an individual. It is a web that includes someone. It is not an object that can be removed. Your body’s innate ability to dance with harm and with discomfort is not always a problem. It is a relational tactic.

But over time, I’d seen that the more zealously we defended our safety and our comfort, the smaller and more sterile our worlds became.

What is health really? What unwellness is our wellness built from? What dystopias do we unwittingly produce when we fixate on personalized completion? What beings, what possible futures and worlds, have been sacrificed to produce our medicine? And what is our healing really for?

The way we talk about trauma easily reveals its theological undertones. In fact, the cataphatic impulse to name everything as trauma rearticulates the medieval impulse to circumscribe God through intellectual acrobatics. Just as medieval theologians pored over scripture, seeking God, so we have become paranoid readers of our own bodies, taking any

I want to suggest that we are all haunted. Not by flashbacks and memories. But by an imaginary idea of wholeness.

We do not bring in priests to exorcise this ghost. Instead, we make it our Holy Spirit. We sacrifice our lives, our time, our money, and our attention at the altar of a body that never existed.