THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE

baby, it’s not that I forgot. it’s that the body never let me.

I used to think I was just a little sore. That maybe I’d slept weird or held my stress wrong. But this spring, the ache in my neck turned into a sermon. It curled itself around the base of my skull and preached pain all day long. And what I started to realize—somewhere between the chiropractor’s crack, the suction of the cupping therapist, the warm glide of lavender oil during massage—is that my body wasn’t just hurting. It was remembering.

And it wasn’t just my body. Every woman I know has been holding her neck like it’s the thing keeping her head on straight. “It’s been a few weeks,” we all said. “I don’t know what happened, but I’ve been in pain.” We weren’t just tense. We were at war. Ask a woman where her body is keeping the score and she won’t even need a beat to answer: her shoulders, her neck, her jaw, her chest, her thighs. Her body knows.

This post is about that war.

Not the kind you read about in history books—though history is in here. This is the war Black women have waged w…