how my introspection writing practice heals me when my body can’t decide (2025)
A reflection on my writing (with trauma content warnings: possible pregnancy loss, fertility issues, trauma, relationship conflicts, gender transition, medical procedures)
I write and reflect constantly. On and off, I’d go on writing binges throughout my life. I used to live-tweet at academic conferences. Sometimes, though, writing becomes difficult—when I’m feeling uninspired, unmotivated, and, most of all, extremely ill. Sometimes, writing felt pressured, like during my PhD, even if I felt so inspired by the topics I was studying.
Sometimes, I didn’t feel the spark to write. I felt dormant for a long time, even when I was in school (and I was solidly in school until age 30/31).
However, since I established stricter boundaries with my biological family, left my ex-spouse at the end of 2022, and began this process I call my “healing journey,” everything changed. I’ve always been on some version of this journey, just as I’ve always been on some kind of spiritual path—even when I was atheistic and agnostic throughout my teens and young adult years. These processes exist in layers, revealing themselves when we’re ready to see them.
Now, I write like how water flows. I can write mountains of pages at work, about my own life, to close friends (once I become comfortable with them)… (and a very sheepish part of me wonders… if I had this ability during my PhD, then maybe I would have been a “better” academic).
The Body’s Extrasensory Language (or is it my AuDHD?)
As a scientist, I find myself fascinated by moments when my body communicates beyond conventional channels. Ear ringing—both left and right—happens at specific moments, sometimes as a warning, sometimes as encouragement. As I began writing this piece, I felt a high-pitched left ear ring that lasted only seconds. I’ve learned to pay attention to these signals, even if I can’t explain them through traditional scientific frameworks.
Sometimes I ignore them, and I retrospectively regret it.
No, I don’t have tinnitus. I got clinically checked in 2019 after several instances of ear ringing, which I now understand were warnings from my inner knowing.
According to various spiritual traditions, left ear ringing (possibly) indicates internal processes, receiving energy, or messages from the spirit world. It’s associated with subconscious connections, intuition, emotional healing, and spiritual awakening.
Whether you believe the metaphysical explanations or see it as the body’s extrasensory way of processing information, I find it beautiful that our bodies might possess ways of knowing that transcend conscious understanding.
The Writing That Writes Me
These processes—the awakening, the boundaries, the leaving—encouraged me to write and create more. I started journaling and blogging almost daily. My Tumblr blog, now mostly private, became my laboratory for self-examination. As I explored in my September 2024 reflection, this introspection practice helped me understand how my “disastrous awakening” of 2022 connected every aspect of my life.
I refused to remain burnt out or lost in a fog. I wanted control over my life.
I also sought freedom from anger and resentment—emotions that surface repeatedly in intimate relationships (to this day!), where I struggle with my boundaries, communication with others, and understanding others’ perspectives. I wanted to forgive myself and others to release these difficult emotions, not because they’re inherently negative, but because I refused to let them control my body and life.
But, control, I’m learning, becomes complicated when your body holds multiple truths simultaneously.
The Pregnancy That Wasn’t (?): A Case Study in Embodied Knowledge
I’m neither machine nor infallible (and I am so grateful for this fact). Since leaving my ex-spouse, I’ve navigated countless breakups, changed my mind repeatedly, and been forced to listen to what my body was telling me—messages that defied intellectuality or logic. It feels like “somatic experiencing” but out in the wild, where my ego, spirit, and body are in this… weird, loving combat.
The end of 2023 brought one of my most challenging experiences with bodily knowing. I was convinced I was pregnant. The symptoms overwhelmed me: ginger ale tasted completely wrong, severe nausea, extreme fatigue, and lower abdominal cramping. I existed in a state of desperate certainty mixed with panic. My partner at the time was not supportive or even truly believed me, which (amongst other reasons) led to our breakup.
Looking back at my Tumblr posts from that period, I see someone caught between relief and devastation. I wrote frantically about not wanting a baby with someone who didn’t want one, while simultaneously grieving the family I’d dreamed of since age thirteen. I wrote about “bonding with my child for years,” about aging eggs and PCOS, about wanting to co-parent with an ideal nesting partner.
When bleeding came during my winter vacation, I couldn’t interpret its meaning. I knew it wasn’t my period. Having experienced pregnancy and miscarriage at twenty-two—a secret I kept until twenty-seven—I knew what that felt like. But the tests, both urine and blood, came back negative. I was taking so many medications then that I doubted their accuracy.
By the time I received an ultrasound in late January 2024, over a month after the bleeding, no pregnancy existed. I was, as I wrote then, “SO RELIEVED” and “SO EXTREMELY DEVASTATED.” I felt betrayed by my own visceral certainty. How could I be so wrong about my body?
Now, finally beginning my fertility journey after turning thirty-five, knowing I have a polyp and endometriosis, it makes sense why I might have miscarried—if that’s what happened.
Or perhaps it was my body’s way of expressing how desperately I wanted pregnancy.
Testosterone and Its Undoing
Despite this pregnancy scare—or perhaps because of it—I moved forward with starting testosterone in August 2024. As I detailed in my September 2024 post, I underwent extensive baseline assessments for my conditions before beginning HRT. My medical transition decision brought clarity, joy, and a feeling of wholeness.
But between late January and early February 2025, I made a different choice. I stopped taking testosterone. I decided I owed myself the attempt to have a family, even without a co-parent. Immediately after my thirty-fifth birthday, I began going to fertility appointments. As I wrote in my June 2025 reflection, this decision carried its own grief—watching a friend start his T journey while I stepped away from mine, my tongue ring falling out that evening like a small metal symbol of letting go.
The Science of Contradiction
I noted in my June 2025 reflection that “my therapist and psychiatrist see this as the queerest part of my journey—not the testosterone or pronouns, but choosing what my body needs over anyone’s expectations. Giving myself permission to want contradictory things. To pursue pregnancy while grieving the transition I’m pausing.”
In my 2024 poem, I wrestled with whether I was abandoning “the life I wanted to conceive” by choosing myself. But I’m learning that choosing myself doesn’t mean selecting one path. Again, it means honoring the multiplicity of desires my body holds.
The sonohysterogram I had posted about earlier proved excruciating—a catheter threaded through my cervix to fill my uterus with saline during ultrasound, without anesthesia. I’m scheduled for surgery in mid-July to remove the polyp they found, hoping it will increase my fertility chances.
Eventually, after recovery, countless tests, and ovulation tracking, I plan to undergo an IUI (intrauterine insemination) procedure with donor sperm from a cryobank. Another catheter will enter my uterus via my cervix, hopefully at the optimal time, hopefully resulting in pregnancy.
Writing Through Relationship Ruptures
This introspection practice—this daily excavation of self, as I call it—has become essential to survival. When my body can’t determine who to trust, when I question whether I was fair to ex-partners, when I navigate healing PTSD and trauma responses while trying to become whole, when I vacillate between transition and fertility, between past and future selves, I write.
Recently, I’ve been processing a particularly painful friendship breakdown through writing. Without revealing identifying details, it involved a situation where well-meaning friends inadvertently triggered my trauma around not being believed. The experience transported me back to the worst aspects of my childhood and adulthood abuse history—the gaslighting, the burden of proof, and the fear of abandonment.
What struck me most was how writing helped me process not just the immediate crisis, but the patterns it revealed. Through extensive reflection—over 20,000 words of private analysis I wrote this past week—I began recognizing how my trauma responses (panic, ultimatums, desperate need for reassurance) were both understandable and harmful. I could trace how miscommunication spiraled, how different processing styles clashed, how good intentions proved insufficient to my body when trauma was activated.
I refuse to feel shame about this situation, and I don’t want to shame others, even in my upset.
It’s complex. All parties, including me, feel misunderstood, and we hold valid perspectives based on our own unique experiences. I am attempting to understand other perspectives and how hurt they must feel in all this, too.
Writing guided me toward forgiveness with boundaries, though I’m uncertain whether the friendship will survive without mutual effort to meet each other equitably. As I wrote privately: “I love you, but I won’t position myself to be hurt like this again unless things change.” This includes changes from me, not just them. This isn’t about grudges—though I harbored resentment temporarily—but about recognizing that healing sometimes means accepting that not all relationships can contain our full complexity.
The Art of Processing Pain
I write through ear ringing that might represent subconscious communication or extrasensory perception. I write through ambiguous bleeding. I write through fertility treatments, paused transitions, and the contradictions that make me human. I write through romantic breakups, friendship ruptures, working FULL-TIME (y’all, I take my job very seriously), friendship maintenance, dating, self-care, chronic condition management, attempts at joy, and the aftermath of triggering conversations.
Writing doesn’t resolve contradictions—it holds space for them. My body might never “decide” in ways my logical mind desires. Instead, it communicates through symptoms and sensations, through ringing ears, flare-ups, and mysterious bleeding, through certainties that prove false and doubts that prove prescient.
Writing documents these undecidable moments in a form of tangible creation and understanding. It feels evolving, helpful, and crucial.
When I review my December 2023 Tumblr posts, I see not mere confusion about possible pregnancy, but someone desperately trying to interpret bodily signals and communicate them to loved ones. When I analyze conflicts with friends and ex-partners, I recognize trauma response patterns that illuminate not just what happened, but why—and what might change. And what I have control over: myself, forgiveness of self, integration of lessons, acceptance of my emotions (including the anger, resentment, grief, love… all of it), and trying again.
As I noted previously in this blog, self-care positively impacts the community at large. When we share these impossible struggles, we create mutual aid—not of resources, but of recognition. We witness each other in our undecidability.
Still Becoming, Still Writing
This practice of introspection—of turning experience into words—has taught me that healing is truly not linear. It’s not about reaching a point where trauma no longer affects us or where our bodies’ signals become clear. It’s about developing the capacity to witness our own complexity with compassion. To sometimes make a choice that isn’t ideal, but that helps us keep going to the next day with all of our mortal obligations we carry.
I’ve written through pregnancy scares and fertility journeys. Through starting and stopping testosterone. Through the dissolution of relationships and the tentative rebuilding of trust. And yeah, this week, I wrote thousands of words analyzing a single conflict to understand every perspective involved - in the midst of writing and programming for my job - in the midst of writing poetry, responding to people’s messages, going outside, moving my body, and celebrating Pride month.
This isn’t obsession—it’s survival. It’s how I make sense of a world that often feels senseless, a body that speaks in riddles, relationships that hold both love and harm.
So yeah, today, I’m still writing. Still tracking the mysterious communications of a body (and spirit?) that knows things my mind cannot grasp. Still believing that this practice of putting words to the wordless might be its own form of healing—or at least, its own form of surviving what cannot be healed in any simple way.
I swear I’ve written this thought before: I think that sometimes the most scientific thing we can do is document the inexplicable, creating data points from our confusion until patterns emerge that no hypothesis could have predicted. And sometimes, the only way through (at least for me) is to write it all down.
I write. Iteratively. Redundantly. Exploring my patterns over and over. Even when it means privately writing over 20,000 words to understand a single friendship conflict that may not ever be resolved. Even when it means keeping a private blog to process the rawness that the world isn’t ready to see. Even when it means crafting article after article about the same themes—bodies, trust, grief, fertility, transition, trauma—because each iteration brings new understanding.
This is how my introspection writing practice heals me when my body can’t decide. Not by providing answers, but by creating a container large enough to hold all the questions. Not by resolving contradictions, but by making art from them. Not by choosing one path, but by documenting the beautiful, terrifying experience of standing at the crossroads, pen in hand (or a keyboard below my fingers lol), writing my way toward whatever comes next.