The Ledger Your Body Keeps
On the Quiet Cost of Choosing Everything Else First
Beloved,
I have been thinking about what it costs to ignore yourself: The quiet, accumulated cost of a thousand small moments where you chose everything else first and told yourself you would get to you later. Later has a way of never arriving.
There is something almost noble-looking about the person who keeps going, who pushes through, who handles it. We have made a virtue out of running on empty. We call it strength. We call it dedication. We celebrate it in each other and we practice it on ourselves, but somewhere in the middle of all that celebrating, we forgot to ask whether any of it was actually sustainable.
Your body remembers everything you have asked of it. It remembers every late night, every skipped meal, and every time you overrode the signal that said enough because something else needed you more. It has been keeping a ledger, because the body is honest in a way that the mind sometimes refuses to be.
What would it mean to be as honest with yourself as your body has been with you?
That is the question I am sitting with this week. Maybe you should too.
With love,
Papa Eli
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