My Own Knowing
My own knowing is not invalidated by the limits of other people's seeing. What I know in my body remains true.
Some kinds of harm have no easy name. The history that resists summary. The thousand small moments that, taken together, made up the truth of your days — but that, taken one at a time, can be dismissed as ordinary. You have been living inside that kind.
You learned, painfully, that some kinds of harm are easier to recognize than others. The harm with bruises. The harm with police reports. The harm with a clear sequence of events. The other kinds — the slow ones, the invisible ones, the ones that lived in tone and pattern — are harder for any outside eye to catch.
This does not mean you imagined it. This does not mean the harm wasn't real. It means the language for it is still being built, in books like this one and in conversations like the ones you have been having with yourself.
Your own knowing is the first witness. Before anyone else can confirm it, you know. Your body knew before your mind had words. Your nervous system knew before your story did. The way you flinched, the way you shrank, the way you stopped writing in your journal — those were testimonies, even before you understood what they were testifying to.
Trust that witness. Trust the long quiet record your body has been keeping — across every season, in every room — without needing an outside chorus to confirm it. You only need to keep listening to the deeper voice that has been telling you the truth all along.