This weekend, my period pain got easier for the first time in three years.

My daughter and I walked into the orthopedic doctor’s office, and there was a poster up, “The new pain scale explained.”

I’d always thought level seven was what I experienced during labor. But then I read “ten” unconscious. 

“Oh, wait, no, that was my labor,” I heard a voice in me say. I went unconscious and began to die. It was my ex-husband who called the nurses in and asked for help. Did I drop back into my body?

For years, I thought this was normal during labor, that you have an out-of-body experience, that the pain suddenly feels “light” and “easy,” and you go into other worlds.

In the hospital room, I saw my cousin who’d passed nearly a decade ago, and my uncle, my mom’s brother, whom I’d never met, who’d passed before I was even born. They had been there in the hospital room the whole time.

It wasn’t until I started working with a highly trained trauma expert psychologist that I learn that my labor was not normal and I did have a near-death experience.

It’s been eleven years since then. I look back on photos of that woman, and I love her. I see in her eyes this ache for a world that does not exist. And she built it as best as she could, by manifesting it first in her body through chronic illnesses, and still to this day, she does the same.

Our bodies are so wise, and we can never lie to them.

We can trick our minds, we can lie to our hearts.

But our bodies always tell the truth.