When My Body Speaks, I Need to Listen

Ignoring my intuition led to pain, but maybe it’s also leading to transformation.

How could listening to my angels have kept me from ending up in a boot? Everyone’s angels communicate differently—some see visions, others hear soft whispers in their mind. I feel mine in my body, and then I translate their messages into words.

The morning of my accident, I wrote in my diary: Maybe don’t push today. You don’t want to get injured. A premonition. But I assumed “injured” meant something small—a pulled muscle, not a full Achilles rupture. I guess my angels are subtle.

A few minutes before I hit the ice—before I somehow miraculously tore my Achilles tendon—I thought to myself, This isn’t fun. I don’t want to be with the people I’m snowboarding with. I was about to take a different run—but I guess I was already too late.

Now, I was riding down with ski patrol, in the most pain I had ever felt in my life. The ski patrol guys were kind, present, angelic—the ones I barely knew were the ones who showed up. The ones I trusted? They disappeared. They didn’t even ride down with me after the injury. One of them eventually took me to the surgeon a few hours later, but in the car, he yelled at me. I was in excruciating pain, completely vulnerable, and somehow I was still being yelled at—for wanting to eat before going to the surgeon.

I felt helpless. I was on morphine, injured, and hungry.

We all have to depend on other people. I don’t know why so many of the people I’ve had to depend on in life have been so awful. I have some good people, but I want to attract more of them, and that’s been hard. I don’t know why. It’s frustrating.

And maybe that’s the bigger lesson—this isn’t the first time I’ve ignored myself. It’s not the first time I’ve let discomfort slide, assuming I could push through it, only to end up hurting myself in ways I should have seen coming. I’ve stayed too long in relationships where I knew something was off. I’ve swallowed my feelings to keep the peace. I’ve second-guessed gut instincts that later proved right. Every time, I tell myself it’s not a big deal—until it is. Until my body stops asking and forces me to listen.

I feel like this happened as a punishment for not listening to my intuition. Or maybe it’s just something that happened. I don’t know. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that I don’t want to keep ignoring myself. I don’t want to keep putting other people’s comfort above my own gut feelings. I want to listen. I need to listen. Because I think—no, I know—my body is trying to guide me.

The other night, I had a dream. I was talking to my therapist, and she was trying to distract me from feeling bad. I said, “But don’t you think everything that has happened is a little harsh?”

And she said, “Imagine someone was sculpting something outside your window. At first, you’d see just a broken shape. You wouldn’t know what it was supposed to be yet.”

I hope my dream was onto something. Because right now, it’s true. All I see is something broken. A life still searching for a way to exist that feels right.

But maybe—just maybe—something is taking shape. Maybe I’m not just falling apart. Maybe I’m becoming something new.

And if that’s true, I owe it to myself to listen—to my body, to my angels—before it’s too late.