Trusting My Own Record

Have you spent years being told the record was wrong? That you were misremembering. That the thing you knew you had heard had not been said. That the moment you knew you had lived had not happened. After enough years of that, you may have started to wonder whether your record could be trusted at all. It can. It always could.

There is a quiet record being kept inside you — not the kind that requires paper, but the kind that lives in the small certainties of the body. The way your shoulders know certain rooms. The way your stomach knows certain footsteps. The way your hands know what they have carried. This record has been writing itself for years. You did not have to remember to keep it. It kept itself.

The record your body has been keeping is more accurate than the version anyone tried to talk you out of. Bodies are not eloquent, but they are honest. They do not embellish. They simply mark what they have lived through, and they keep marking it, and one morning you wake up and you can read the marks again.

You do not have to defend the record. You do not have to argue for it. You only have to trust it. The trust itself is the long restoration. It is the slow undoing — one quiet day at a time — of all the years you were asked to mistrust yourself.

Today, when something inside you knows a thing to be true, let yourself believe what you know. You do not need outside confirmation for the inside knowing to be real. Your record has been faithful to you. You can be faithful back.