𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐇𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲?

What does denial feel like in the body?

A turning away.

The eyes avert.

The heart closes.

The coldness of a back turned toward you.

A tightening.

A contraction.

Shame.

Smallness.

Aloneness.

Most of us know this feeling.

Perhaps because denial is not just an idea.

It is a lived experience.

I wonder what happens to pain that isn’t acknowledged.

In a family, someone usually carries it.

The sensitive child.

The scapegoat.

The truth teller.

But families are not the only places this happens.

Communities do it.

Institutions do it.

Cultures do it.

I think about the stories we’ve inherited.

The experiences of Indigenous peoples.

Women.

Black communities.

Gay communities.

Entire groups of people whose realities were questioned, minimized, or erased.

What happens when a culture turns away from truths it does not want to face?

Where does that pain go?

Does it disappear?

Or does it live on in bodies?

In relationships?

In communities?

In the land itself?

What does truth feel like in the body?

Sometimes it feels shaky.

A trembling.

A disorientation.

Reality colliding with identity.

The moment when what is real no longer fits the story we’ve been telling ourselves.

There can be fear.

Confusion.

Resistance.

And sometimes curiosity.

Is denial what happens when reality threatens an identity we’ve built our lives around?

Is denial sometimes an attempt to preserve a sense of safety?

Yet I wonder what becomes possible when we develop the capacity to stay present.

To remain open.

To question what we’ve inherited.

To tolerate the discomfort of seeing more clearly.

To me, safety is not the absence of hardship.

It is trusting my capacity to meet hardship.

It is being rooted enough in my body that truth no longer feels like a threat.

It is connection.

Community.

Support.

The willingness to hold both darkness and light.

Perhaps freedom is not freedom from the other.

Perhaps freedom is the capacity to remain connected to ourselves, each other, and reality.

Even when the truth shakes us.

💚