Autoimmunity in Freefall
I used to measure my body in height and air—
how long I could stay suspended
before gravity remembered me.
There were mirrors then,
not for checking if I was still here,
but to watch the arc of myself—
a body that knew how to leave the ground
and trust it would return whole.
I was muscle and timing,
breath held at the peak of a flip,
the brief, holy silence before landing.
Now I measure in minutes.
Ten feels like a dare.
Fifteen feels like arrogance.
I sit upright like it’s an act of defiance,
like my spine is a flag I’m trying to keep raised
in a wind that will not let up.
And it’s ridiculous,
isn’t it?
That the same body
that once snapped through the air—
tight, precise, obedient—
now trembles
from the simple, humiliating act
of existing vertically.
There is no choreography for this.
No applause
for enduring a chair
like it’s a battlefield.
No scorecard
for the days I don’t collapse
until later.
Just the quiet math of decline—
ten years
of subtraction.
First the stamina.
Then the certainty.
Then the language for what is happening
when your own blood
starts behaving like a stranger
with keys to every locked room.
Autoimmune.
Such a clean word
for something that feels like betrayal
from the inside out.
My body—
once a partner—
now misreads me constantly,
mistakes me for a threat,
attacks with the precision
I used to have.
It learns my weaknesses faster than I do.
And every year
it gets better at it.
I am so tired.
Not the kind of tired
that sleep negotiates with.
The kind that lives in the marrow,
in the hinge of every joint,
in the soft, electric burn of nerves
that never agreed to this war.
The kind that makes you cry
because sitting up
has turned into something
you have to recover from.
And I do cry.
Not elegantly.
Not in metaphors.
Just—
face in hands,
shoulders shaking
because ten minutes
should not cost this much.
Because this is not what I trained for.
I once trained for impact.
For landing hard and getting up again.
For pushing through soreness,
for the good kind of pain—
the kind that meant you were becoming
something stronger.
This is not that pain.
This is erosion.
Slow.
Patient.
Indifferent.
And what makes it unbearable—
what makes it feel like something sharper
than just illness—
is knowing
this didn’t grow in a vacuum.
That my nervous system learned its chaos
in a house
where stability was optional.
Where I became elastic
not just in body
but in spirit—
stretching to meet moods,
to anticipate storms,
to make myself smaller, quieter, easier
to hold.
And somewhere in all that stretching
something tore
that never healed right.
And now my body remembers
what my mind tried to file away.
It remembers
the constant alertness,
the never-quite-safe,
the way rest was something
you earned
by not needing anything.
So now rest won’t come.
Or if it does,
it comes like a stranger
who refuses to stay long.
And I am angry.
God, I am angry.
At the years I am losing
in increments so small
no one else can see them.
At the way my life has narrowed
to the radius of what I can endure
on any given day.
At the way people say
“listen to your body”
as if my body
isn’t the one screaming nonsense
into every quiet moment.
At the way this feels like consequence
for something I didn’t choose.
At the way I can trace the lines back—
not perfectly, not neatly,
but enough to know
this didn’t just happen.
That neglect has a half-life.
That instability ferments.
That trauma
doesn’t always look like memory—
sometimes it looks like inflammation.
And I am furious
that I have to carry that.
That I have to untangle
a body that learned the wrong lessons
too early.
That I have to grieve
a version of myself
who could flip through the air
without thinking
about whether her heart
would betray her
mid-flight.
I miss her.
I miss the certainty
of muscles that answered
when I called.
I miss the simplicity
of being tired
for a reason.
I miss the arrogance
of believing my body
was mine.
Now everything is negotiation.
Every movement,
a question.
Every day,
a recalibration
of what I can afford
to lose.
But I am still here.
Even like this—
shaking,
angry,
exhausted beyond language—
I am still here.
And there is something
quietly defiant in that.
Something ungraceful,
unpoetic,
but real—
the way I keep sitting up
even when it hurts,
the way I keep existing
in a body that keeps rewriting
the rules.
This is not the life
I practiced for.
But it is the one
I am enduring.
And somewhere, buried deep
beneath the fatigue
and the grief
and the anger that burns hotter
than anything I ever performed—
there is still a body
that remembers
what it meant
to rise.
- LR
