Judging my safety
Like collapsing sandcastles
Rough-built at high tide

Feeble foundations
Based on assumptions
Freak waves waiting

Only recently 
I learnt that not everyone 
Always feels afraid

Turn gently inward
To ask whether I’m okay
Quietly observe

The body holds the answers
Truer than the pliant mind

jill_1

Listening to my body

Jun 6, 2026

June 2026

2026

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Nick-Moore

Brilliant Jill, being self aware, you're halfway there x

removed.-zk5k

oldpoetMK

DanielTucker

Beautiful truths in a lovely frame, Jill.

NevilleZ

michael-murphy

removed.u685248

This is where all the Jills went to :-) !!

This really hit home, it took most of my life to find out I had PTSD, so that finding out that not everyone holds a constant fear in, and not even my mind, nor my body, or even soul, but just my heart. My heart is awash in constant anxiety, and I take a whole of pills to try to hold it back, but the only thing I've found that takes the sharpest edges off my symptoms, phobias galore, social, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, heightened startle response... I can just go off from something as innocuous as an old woman counted out change on a countertop sounding like shells hitting the deck... after that episode I didn't leave my house or see or talk to another human being for 16 months, self-imposed solitary, entire days cursing my body for not obeying my mind, frozen, unable to turn a door knob... the only thing that doesn't get rid of the anxiety that people don't understand, it's living in Hell when it becomes so constant and overpowering, I've lost three good friends, a wife, a partner, and two unborn children to it, and that wasn't weakness, and I'm rambling, no, all five were among the greatest heroes and the bravest people I shall never know, it's anything but weakness, it's holding a hand to red-hot stovetop burner, feeling that skin blacken, and crackle, and trying to just press that hand down against it... none of them wanted to die, they just wanted the pain to end... but where modern pharmaceuticals have failed other than taking away my will to do anything at all, including trying to kill myself again, it's love, love doesn't chase away the panic, the fight-flight-freeze of a caveman with a sabre-tooth tiger chasing them down, hot breath on their ass, but the tiger isn't there, but it doesn't matter, it FEELS likes it's there, and that's more than enough, love doesn't extinguish it, love just outsings it, it's louder, from another, yes, and even on some rare occasions, from myself.

This poem made me feel of that, relive of a lifetime of it, in the space of less than a minutes read. And I try not to think all of that, but your words gave me no choice. Now that's powerful writing.

irinia