When I ordered this book from Sophie Strand, I had read that it was a matriarchal alternative to The Body Keeps the Score. I knew it was going to be feminist and animist and embodied and good. I sat down, excited to read a book that I was already aligned with.

I actually pre-ordered this book back when it was published, a whole year or more before I actually sat down to read it. But the universe has a way with timing, you know. I have long been a therapist who specializes in trauma and chronic illness. After those specializations, I realized I, too, had complex PTSD, and even much later than that, a chronic illness. Of course I had always known that I had them, but it’s wild how much the acceptance of a label swirls everything around to a new perspective like some (not so)funhouse camera trick.

What I did not expect to be reading was a memoir of a woman who has the same illness(es) with which I had been newly diagnosed a few short months ago. I hadn’t even realized it was a book about chronic illness, much less about MCAS, dysautonomia, and connective tissue disorders. The symptom clusters and root causes for these illnesses are mysterious and overlapping - this trio almost always co-occurs (plus some others). It is actually not rare, but remains tragically under-known in the medical world. Part of the reason for this is that its symptoms are so varied that our siloed health system has a hard time recognizing the patterns, because everyone is only looking at a part of the whole. And part of it, of course, is because it largely occurs in women.

Long before I actually got any diagnosis (or at least, any correct diagnosis), as a trauma therapist I did get the strange “comfort” of hearing story after story of women with complex trauma histories having similar families of progressive symptoms (read: progressive disability), similar decades-long tales of medical dismissal and gaslighting, similar patterns of hypervigilance about our “malfunctioning” bodies, similar unrelenting, invisible grief. I had a birds-eye view that at least could tell me that I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t imagining anything. About a month before I did find a specialist who could diagnose me (after decades of doctors, and recently diagnosing myself with the help of two evils: my instagram algorithm and ChatGPT), I had a sit-down with myself and decided that I was going to claim my chronic illness, even if it never got a name. It was way past time, and way past tired, that I make some actual accommodations in my life instead of harming myself by continuing to strive to do all the things I thought or wished I should be able to do.

I couldn’t believe how much of myself I was reading on these pages - not just about the illness (our symptoms are actually quite different), but more numinous commonalities, like a fascination with mycelia (but also, who isn’t fascinated by mycelia?), a connection to The Fool, a longing for and disillusionment with “human teachers,” ruminations on the bewilderment and pain of the liminality of metamorphosis and the spaciousness of time, the cellular wisdom of an unfolding pregnancy and pregnancy loss, the longing for healing and to be “fixed,” being taught by a groundhog, the swallowing of pain to rescue another, the desire to scream. The desire to scream. When she directly called mycelia the “fascial tissue” of the soil, I could hear synapses connecting that I can’t yet put words to. There was enough synchronicity to start to view these illnesses as a mycelial network connecting all of us who share them, teaching us through metaphor.

I think the most impactful thread running through this book, through so many of my former clients, and through me - is that out of a sincere and desperate desire to be well, we can really inflict a whole lot of harm on ourselves. These particular disorders do not respond well to striving. If you push beyond your ever-shrinking limit, you’ll pay for it - for days, weeks, or months. We have done our own research. We have tried all the diets. We have prayed the prayers and done the rituals and tried to hold our bodies in just the right positions. And it hasn’t mattered much. Internal and external messages are all too eager to tell us that this must mean we haven’t tried hard enough.

Sophie talks about our bodies, as survivors of trauma, as open doorways. A gate left open, “wide open.” And that dangerous condition, one in which a danger slipped past the alarm system, has left us hypersensitive, hypervigilant, ensuring no more danger sneaks through. I have a recurring dream in my life - I’m driving down the road, usually at night, and I’m falling asleep and cannot stay awake nor stop the car. I know I’m going to crash, and I wake up when I do. A very on-the-nose metaphor for exhaustion and feeling out of control. Recently, I’ve had a dream that began in the aftermath of a crash. I was fine, the car was totalled (but made of giant legos), and I was trying to remember what had happened, but I had no memory. There were no keys in the ignition, so I realized I had not been driving after all. People showed up to help, and then I woke up. This is a shift I’m still integrating - I don’t yet have the right words for it; it hasn’t made its way all the way up to my brain, but I trust it is meaningful. In my waking world, there is something still transitioning from an internally focused hypervigilance: there’s something wrong with me, and I must fix it, to a view that’s pointed out: there’s something that has felt unsafe, and I’ve been protecting myself when perhaps I don’t need to anymore. I feel a familiar message from the ones who guide me, and Sophie shares: “My only job was to stay very still and not try to accelerate through the uncertainty.” A tattoo on my wrist from my early 20’s: “Be still,” (implied: and know). Sophie talks later about this “wider gating” as maybe also a wider gate for possibility, for communication, for knowing, for miracles. I can’t quite get there yet, but I like it, and I think the connections are heading in that direction.

My overall feeling reading this book was a wish with all my might that it was going to have an ending that I knew it was not going to have (spoiler alert) - one with a cure, or even a remission. The withstanding questions I’m left with are: how can I find more acceptance for exactly where I am today? How can we find more spaciousness and grace and love and joy and rest in this present moment? How can I maintain a balance of doing the things to care for myself and feel my best without it tipping over into exiling and flagellating this just-as-I-am self again? How can we engage in spiritual practices in a relational way without slipping unnoticeably into a transactional resentment for a savior who never came? How do I find even more embodied safety? How can I hear the parts who have not yet known safety? How can we let out the feelings we choke back? Where should I go lay on the ground to listen?

I think that I likely have Sophie to thank for my own diagnosis, and therefor the helpful medications I now take, and the shift in perspective that comes from finally being believed and validated. It was likely her book that brought MCAS into the zeitgeist enough for it to reach my algorithm. It’s a shame it couldn’t have just been a doctor. Thank you, Sophie, for sharing your story. May this sharing bring more awareness. May we all feel more witnessed and believed. May we all be well, and may we love the parts of us that are unwell.