Nobody taught us to listen to our bodies.
For a lot of Black and Brown people — particularly women — the opposite was true. We were taught that the body is to be beaten into submission. The thing you override. The thing you push past on the way to wherever you’re going.
We were told: Don’t cry. Stop being so sensitive. You’re too emotional. Toughen up.
Strength looked like not feeling. Or more accurately — it looked like feeling and not showing it. Feeling and not responding to it. Feeling and continuing anyway, like the feeling wasn’t even there.
And there is real wisdom in that. Our people survived things by learning to adapt and to keep moving. That is ancestral power, and I won’t downplay it.
But some survival strategies have a shelf life. What kept our ancestors moving through unbearable circumstances can become — in our bodies, in our lives — a reflex that overrides information we actually need.
And it follows us directly to the writing desk.
The Silence Wound Lives in the Body, Not the Mind
In Sunday’s essay, The Two Drafts, I wrote about the silence wound — the reflex that deletes the sentence before you know you’re going to delete it. That softens the claim. That translates your voice into something more acceptable before anyone asks.
What I didn’t have space to say in the essay is this: that reflex isn’t a thought. You can’t argue yourself out of it. It’s a physiological response — your nervous system assessing a threat and responding accordingly. That’s just how the nervous system works.
And if you were taught that your body’s signals are obstacles to override, you will never catch this wound while it’s operating. Because catching it requires noticing it. And noticing requires you to be in relationship with your own body in the first place.
That’s not a small thing to ask. For a lot of us, our families, our communities, our culture conditioned us not to do that.
What I’m really asking when I say pay attention to what happens in your body when you write — is a reclamation assignment. Not a writing exercise.
The Time Spirit Got My Ass Together — One of Many
A few months ago I felt called to pull cards for the collective. Write up the reading. Share it on Substack.
I pulled the cards. I wrote it exactly the way Spirit gave it to me — raw, direct, no softening. Let it sit. Then went back to edit.
And started editing it down to the ground.
I was debating back and forth with Spirit like — I cannot say it like that. Somebody’s going to get offended. I was doing the thing in real time. Taking the potency out of something that was given to me in that specific form for a reason — because it needed to land a certain way — and sanding it down because my body was afraid of the response.
Spirit, very lovingly, got my ass together.
The message: yes, delivery matters. We should always use care in our communication. But sometimes something needs to be said in a specific way so it can land the way it needs to land. Put everything back exactly the way it was.
So I did. Quick proofread for spelling and grammar — because I’m an editor, that’s non-negotiable — and then I published it before my fear could talk me out of it again.
Then came the hard part. Sitting with it being out there. Edge-snatching and raw and on the internet for whoever needed it.
Here’s what that story illustrates: I know this work. I teach this work. I built a career helping writers find their truest voice on the page. And I still had to be corrected in real time.
That’s how deep the conditioning goes. It doesn’t care what you know. It cares how safe your body feels.
What Listening Looks Like
The work starts with noticing. Before you can change anything, you have to be willing to feel it — not analyze it, not fix it right away. Just feel it.
What does your body do when you open the document? When you start writing the sentence you know is going to make somebody clutch their pearls? Where does the tightness live? What do your hands do?
These are the beginning of a somatic writing practice. Learning to be in your body while you write — instead of writing from somewhere above it or outside of it entirely.
And I want to say this directly to the Black and Brown writers here: listening to your body is not self-indulgence. It is not weakness. It is not the opposite of discipline.
It is the reclaiming of information that was systematically taken from us. The right to feel what we feel. To let the body speak. To treat its signals as data instead of obstacles.
Our ancestors survived by overriding their bodies. They had to.
We get to survive differently. We get to write from them.
You Are Not Broken
You’re not undisciplined. You’re not someone who just needs better writing habits or a tighter morning routine.
You’re a writer whose body learned things that made sense at the time. And who now gets to learn something different.
That’s the work. It’s slower than any productivity system. And it’s worth every single minute.
If you’re ready to do this work in a structured container, Write From the Wound is a 7-day shadow work journey built for exactly this — not to push through the resistance, but to understand what it’s been protecting.
Join Write From the Wound → Click here
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