Messenger, Not Archive
Grief taught me the difference between the body keeping the score and what it's still reporting—right now.
Prefer to listen? An audio version of this essay is available on Substack.
Light
Dark
It was past midnight when I called Isamu's mother, Mary, from the payphone in the cold entryway of the emergency room.
I kept my voice level. Matter-of-fact. Almost administrative. The tone of someone relaying information she hasn't yet absorbed herself. I told Mary what the doctors had told us a few hours earlier. Three dark spots on his brain. They didn't yet know what they were.
I delivered the information cleanly, but I imagined the news reaching her like lightning, and I was uneasy to be the one to deliver it. Meanwhile, on my end of the line, there was no strike. The words thundered through me and landed nowhere. The impact delayed—the flash now, the thunder later, the blow itself still traveling toward me across a distance I couldn't yet measure.
I hung up the heavy receiver. I was still standing.
At the time, I thought that was composure.
I thought I was handling it—whatever it was.
It took me years to understand that the not-landing was the message. My body was doing something my mind couldn't yet afford to do—holding the blow at a distance. Not storing it. Managing it. Buying time I didn’t yet know I needed.
I had to drive home from the hospital. Feed the cats. Call my parents and boss in the morning with the same message I had just shared with Mary. Get back to Isamu as soon as I possibly could.
My body knew first. It was holding me up until I could catch up.
Isamu died nearly two and a half years after that phone call. By the time this piece reaches you, it will be twenty-four years since his death, almost to the day. I’ve been living inside that grief ever since. And it has its own particular texture—set in motion in a cold hospital entryway, with a payphone receiver in my hand.
For a long time I understood that night the way I understood everything that came after it: as something that had happened to me. Filed. Part of the score my body was keeping. Something to be unpacked, unraveled, understood.
“The score looks back. The signal speaks now.”
But I missed what my body has been telling me since that night. That it wasn't only keeping the score of what happened. It was reporting—then, and still—that the grief of that moment is not behind me. It is here. Now.
The Score and the Signal: Beyond The Body Keeps the Score
Before I can tell you what my body has been doing, I have to talk about the expression that gave us the context we badly needed, and then, just as quickly, hardened into a cage.
Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score (2014) handed us the vocabulary for what we’d been living without language. Symptoms were not made up. Pain was not exaggerated. Fatigue, hypervigilance, the inability to sleep through the night, the body that flinched at sounds it could not name—these were not character flaws or hormonal complaints or the products of an overactive imagination. They were, as the book told us, the body remembering—holding on to what the mind wasn't ready to metabolize.
The extended body of work, and even the phrase—the body keeps the score—legitimized somatic experience at the exact moment it needed legitimacy. Women had spent generations being told their bodies were lying to them. That the pain was nerves or a nervous condition. That the exhaustion was attitude. That the symptom with no clean cause was no real symptom at all—just a woman feeling too much, reporting too loudly, asking for too much attention. Hysteria had a long afterlife. van der Kolk’s framework gave women a way to say, against all of that: this is real, this is in my body, this is not in my head.
The body keeps the score arrived as a kind of permission. It named something substantial: the body remembers. Not as metaphor or anthropomorphizing, but as biology. A nervous system that learned, under threat, to stay braced, and kept bracing long after the threat was gone. A stress response that came online and never fully powered down. Sleep that thinned. Digestion that changed. An immune system quietly altered by years of running hot. The startle that arrives before the thought does. What happened to you left a mark, not only in your mind. It's in how your body has been running ever since.
After a century of medicine treating the body as a machine and our suffering as imaginary, this was a profound correction. I don't want anything that follows to suggest I'm questioning it. It's true.
True, but partial.
Many of the readers most affected by van der Kolk’s writing are women who first found their way to taking their own bodies seriously through his book or the broader cultural conversation it shaped.
And.
The framework, held as the whole story, has done one thing it did not intend to do.
The phrase the body keeps the score casts the body as an archive—a place where the past is stored, waiting to be recovered, labeled, released. The job, in that frame, is what we might think of as excavation. You must release it in order to heal. The approach borrowed the concept of root cause and pointed it backward—as if the root were an event or timeframe in your history, a single wound to discover and dissect. And in this frame, every symptom becomes a clue to a wound: the racing heart points back to the old fear, the chronic pain to the old injury, the body's present trouble understood as a message from the past, wedged in the flesh, awaiting release.
The direction is always backward, toward what was.
That’s the score. And, according to van der Kolk, your body is keeping it.
Yet that framing, held as the whole story, obscures another thing the body is doing.
The body isn't only keeping the score of what happened a long time ago. Your body is a homeodynamic organism—a system in constant motion, reading and answering to the demands of the current moment. It's reporting—continuously, in the present tense—on what's happening now. Not an archive. A witness. Not storage. Testimony. The racing heart, the breath that won't deepen, the grief that arrives without warning on an ordinary Thursday afternoon—these are not only echoes of an old wound surfacing. The heart rate might be reporting on the room you're standing in right now—the conversation you're not having, the cortisol rising, the caffeine you just drank, the grief that is today's, not 2002's. They're signals about a current state, in a current body, in a current life.
The score looks back. The signal speaks now.
Both are real. The score and the signal.
The body remembering and the body reporting.
The failure is never in listening to one. The failure is deciding in advance which one you'll hear. Conventional medicine often wants only the present-tense fact, stripped of the story that gives it meaning. The trauma frame longs for the lineage, until every present signal is read as an echo of an old one. Each reaches for its default before the body has finished speaking.
The discipline is to listen without knowing yet which it is—a discipline I've seen slip through the hands of many patients and practitioners, and have sometimes fumbled myself. The work is letting the body report—and only then asking whether what it's telling you belongs to what was, or what is, or, as is so often the case, to both realities at once.
What My Body Kept Doing
Isamu died on July 19th, three days after my thirty-sixth birthday. Our son was not yet two.
I tell the story of those years, as I am doing now, as a thing that had happened and ended. His diagnosis. The duration of his treatments. Love. Care. Death. Widowhood. Single motherhood. Past tense. The score, kept and filed.
While those things happened, my body never agreed that any of it was over. It still hasn’t.
The world wanted it to be. Coaches urged me to tell my story—my health, my struggles, my body—as a pilgrimage: here's what I survived, here's how I healed, here's the wisdom on the other side. Past tense. Resolved. The redemption arc. The grief useful only as a credential, proof of a hard thing overcome. No one wanted to hear that I was still grieving. That I am grieving now. That the loss isn't a chapter I closed. It's a thread I exist inside.
The grief I carry now is not the grief of 2002 played back. It's today's grief—further shaped by a Tuesday last fall while listening to my son play a song on the piano that Isamu used to love, the loss landing fresh in a body twenty-four years older than the one that first felt it. Sure, the original loss is embedded in the grief. But it isn't a memory surfacing. It's a present-tense ache, happening now, in the life I'm actually living—informed by what was, but not reducible to it.
And it isn't only Isamu I grieve. There’s also my father who died ten years ago. The mixed pride and heartbreak of a son building a life nearly five thousand miles away. Stepping away from work I spent decades building and loving. Each of those sorrows is its own, and each happens in the present tense. None of them arrives untouched by the first. They move through a channel that loss carved a long time ago. The grief is current. Its texture is inherited.
I’ve stopped thinking of the nature of that grief as damage—as a fracture to be fixed, cleared, or finally resolved. We're taught that when we find the pains of the past, the job is repair. To reach back, resurface, and be done. But a loss isn't a problem with a solution. It's more like muscle. Built through use. Not stronger, exactly—but differently able to hold what it holds. A capacity.
“A loss isn’t a problem with a solution. It’s more like muscle. Built through use.”
My hands seem to know this. There's a thing I used to do with them. I'd twist my wedding band up to the first knuckle and back down, settle it into the groove it had worn over the years, then start again. I'd turn the engagement ring on my other hand around and around, hooking my thumb against the raised diamond to spin the band in place, round and round my finger. I did it so long I stopped noticing I was doing it. Someone had to point it out. Sometimes I'd catch my own hands mid-motion to know they'd been at it. Again.
The habit started on the nights I came home from the hospital alone, in those first days, before any of us knew what was ahead, what those dark spots on Isamu’s brain scan would mean. My hands found the rings as I lay alone in our bed, restless with worry. I thought it was a nervous fixation. A small self-soothing impulse I'd grow out of once the crisis passed.
The initial crisis passed—and led to another, and another. My hands kept going.
Twenty-four years later I no longer wear the wedding and engagement rings. Now it's my Oura ring, and two bands of tiny beads, but the same twisting and turning. Not every turn is a sign of grief. Sometimes my hands just move, the way hands do. The practice is in knowing I don't always have to assign meaning to the movement.
Messenger, Not Archive
It would be easy to assume that science is on the side of storage—that the body keeps the score is a literal, biological truth and the rest is interpretation. It isn't. Not quite.
Recent neuroscience has begun to question the storage metaphor on biological grounds. A paper published earlier this spring in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience—coauthored by Karl Friston, one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world—argued that trauma is not inscribed in muscle, fascia, or non-neural tissue. What persists, in their account, is more like a nervous system that has learned to expect danger and keeps bracing for it.
The body, in their framing, participates as a messenger, not an archive. It’s not keeping the score. It’s sending a signal.
Here I want to be careful about something. Neuroscience research and clinical understanding are different kinds of work. The researchers are trying to map the mechanism. What's actually happening in the nervous system when the past keeps shaping the present? How does the brain produce these symptoms or reactions? Where, in the nervous system, does what we call trauma actually live? Their answers are descriptive. They're doing biology—mapping how, not what to do about it. That distinction matters.
Meeting you—the patient, in a clinical room—is a different kind of work entirely.
What makes that encounter succeed is whether your testimony is received or waved away, whether the framework your practitioner reaches for opens the door or forecloses it, whether what you're told about your body returns you to your own signals or estranges you further from them. That isn't only biology. It's something biology can't settle on its own—dignity.
Research and clinical care should be in conversation. They don't have to be in agreement.
A finding can be true and still fail the patient—correct about the biology, and missing the person living inside it. This new research reveals that the body isn't a storage vault. It does not, literally, keep the score. But the research goes on to treat the body's signals as noise for the brain to correct—and that's where I part ways.
Because that suggestion, applied in a clinical environment, comes uncomfortably close to the old dismissal in new vocabulary. Tell a woman her racing heart is a faulty prediction for her brain to correct, and you have told her something not far from what women heard for two thousand years, when the womb itself was blamed for whatever medicine couldn't explain. The mechanism is different, but the structural move is the same.
So I’ll take what the research is establishing and leave what it suggests for patient care. The word I really want to borrow from their work is messenger.
Even the researchers most determined to dismantle the storage metaphor land there. Your body is a messenger, carrying something to you right now that it needs you to receive.
The question is whether you pick up.
Interpreted Away
Years after Isamu died, I went to see a clinician about a cluster of symptoms I was experiencing. An odd shift in my body composition. Sluggishness. Recurring ear infections. Tender breasts—the pain so sharp I flinched from my young son's hugs. The body was reporting that something was, most definitely, off.
The clinician identified my challenges as "adrenal fatigue."
It was the explanation of the moment. And it was, in a way, validating. It was a story about my past—the toll of everything I had survived finally catching up with me, coming through me. And it fit. It was the kind of explanation that can feel like being seen for how much you’ve carried.
It was also a tidy version of a root-cause story. The grief, the years of strain, could well be part of what was happening in my body. But a true story about the past is the most dangerous kind of assumption. It can be the hardest to question and the easiest to blame. This one matched too well to keep looking. So the present-tense report—the thyroid actually faltering, the immune system actually struggling, now, today—went unexamined. The past didn't mislead anyone. It just allowed us to close the case before the case was done.
The score got read, but no one turned the page to the signal.
This is the pattern I want to name, because it's not only mine.
When a woman brings her body's report to a clinician—the fatigue that doesn't correspond to her labs, the pain with no clean cause, the sense that something has shifted—she is, very often, not believed at the level of now. She's believed, if at all, at the level of then.
This is the particular blind spot of an era that has rightly learned to take the past seriously, and has sometimes learned to reach for it first. Conventional medicine still makes the opposite mistake: it sees only the acute, the present complaint, the lab value, and waves the history away. But step into the worlds I've worked in for two decades—functional, integrative, trauma-informed care—and the misstep flips. Now everything points back. The past becomes the answer before the present has finished speaking.
Few encounters, in either world, weigh the two.
Her present-tense report gets routed backward. It must be her stress. Her adverse experiences. Her anxiety. Something stored. Something psychological. Something that happened to her once and is surfacing again, now.
The body's testimony about a current state gets read as evidence about her past, or her psyche, and quietly set aside.
For generations, a woman's symptoms were her hysteria—a word built from the Greek for womb, a whole diagnostic tradition premised on the idea that a woman's body was an unreliable narrator of its own condition. We don't use the word anymore. But the reflex lives on.
And here's the part that is hardest to say. The archive model can deepen the very dismissal it set out to correct. If everything the body does now is mostly an echo of what happened then, then the present-tense report—this is happening to me, currently, in this body—has nowhere to land. It gets interpreted backward by default. The story of the past becomes the lens that explains away the evidence of the present.
“Believe the report. Suspend the verdict.”
I want to be specific about what I'm suggesting, because it's easy to mistake.
I’m not saying every signal carries a life-changing message. A racing heart is real, but real isn’t the same as meaningful. The body reports. It doesn't decide what the report means—and sometimes the report doesn't mean much at all. Sometimes a racing heart is fear, or grief, or a thyroid. But sometimes it’s three cups of coffee. Part of crediting the body is letting it speak without forcing every signal to carry unmitigated meaning.
Somewhere along the way—in learning how to track and tune-in—we've become like new parents bent over the crib, decoding every burp and gurgle for meaning. Sometimes the gurgle matters and carries a message. Often it's just a baby being a baby, with a body that’s growing and adapting at a baffling pace. There's a time and place for decoding. But for a certain kind of careful, health-literate woman, analysis has become a way of life. An exhausting one. The reading is ours to do—including the reading that says: this one is just my body, being a body in this moment.
What I'm asking is smaller and more radical than "trust the body." It’s also harder. Believe the report. Suspend the verdict. The body is a reliable witness to what is happening. It’s not a reliable judge of what it means. So let the report into the room. Admit it as evidence. Weigh it as a signal about the present, not only as a clue to the past. And then—this is the hard part—let the meaning stay open. Let it emerge in its own time, if it emerges at all.
The wrong done to women was never that their bodies were interrogated too closely. It's that their bodies were dismissed at the door—or, in the rooms that finally let them in, buried under a story they never offered. Ruled inadmissible or over-read. Either way, never simply heard. Before she could be a reliable witness to her own life—believed, and trusted to make sense of it in her own time.
The Thread, Not the Verdict
If the body is reporting, and we let the report into the room—what do we do with it?
This is the harder half of the question. Crediting the body's signal is one thing. Knowing what authority that signal carries—what it gets to decide, and what it doesn't—is another. And it's here that the whole idea can go wrong. It’s also where narrative medicine often gets misunderstood.
When people hear that the body tells a story, they may hear one of two very different things, and collapse them into one.
The first is: story as explanation—the fixed account we drape over a feeling to account for it, and often to excuse it. I reacted that way because of what happened to me. This is my wound. Don't ask me to answer for it. That kind of story converts the antecedent into the answer. It collapses the question. It uses the past as an alibi for the present, and it's the version that makes thoughtful people distrust the whole enterprise—because if every reaction is just a remote insult discharging, no one can be reasoned with, and nothing can change.
I hurt you because I was hurt.
It runs in the family.
It's in my DNA.
I was born this way.
When I speak of narrative practice, that is not the story I mean. This is where narrative is justification and the origin becomes the ruling. The case is closed before it's heard.
The second mistake is story as definitive revelation: the past as buried answer. The belief that if you dig far enough back, you'll unearth what it all really means—that the meaning is down there, waiting. This is the archive again, wearing narrative clothes. Find the origin, decode the symptom.
Both hand the meaning to the past.
None of those “narratives” are lies, exactly. Things do run in families. The past does shape the being, sometimes across generations. But knowing where a feeling or a symptom comes from doesn't decide what it means, or what you do about it. The origin explains. It doesn't absolve.
My grief did not stay where I had filed it. It did not stay in the spring of 2000 at the hospital payphone, or the summer of 2002 in the sun-filled room where Isamu died, or in the months that followed when our son was learning to run and his father could no longer watch him. The grief moved with me. Into the years of building a practice. Into building a business. Into the work I did with patients whose bodies had also been carrying things no one was crediting. It moved into how I parent, how I love, how I sit with someone else's worst hour. It moved into what I notice and what I cannot look away from. It has a fabric. It’s manifestly mine just as the threads of your life are beautifully, and unmistakably, yours.
The grief is not stored. It’s not buried. It’s not keeping a score. It’s integrated into how I am functioning now. When my hands twist at the rings, they are not reaching backward. They are reporting on a now that has Isamu woven all the way through it.
“The thread shapes what my grief feels like. It does not get to decide what it means.”
This is the distinction this whole piece turns on. The thread shapes what my grief feels like. It does not get to decide what it means.
Here's what I mean by that. When my son moved to Tokyo, the grief that rose was shaped by the grief experienced with Isamu—heavier, more familiar, routed through a loss I already knew by heart. That's the thread. It set the texture of the feeling. I didn't cause the feeling. And the feeling isn’t something to fix. What that grief meant—whether it was mostly mourning, or mostly abandonment, or mostly fear, or the strange braid that it turns out to be—that part wasn't handed to me by the past. It wasn't predetermined and waiting to be uncovered. It emerged as I lived into it. Not decided and not excavated. Witnessed. Befriended. Allowed to become what it was becoming, in the present, out of the life I'm actually living.
Those are different powers, and keeping them separate is the entire discipline.
And this is what answers the obvious objection—that attending to the present means ignoring the past. The opposite is true. The present moment that the body is reporting on already contains everything that shaped it. Nothing is sealed off in a compartment marked then. Nothing is buried, so nothing needs to be dug up. It's all here—in the report, in the texture of right now.
To attend, then, is to do two things at once.
Receive the feeling as true.
Keep the meaning open.
What the Body Has Been Telling You
I think about that woman on the payphone sometimes. Thirty-four, voice level, holding the worst news of her life at arm's length so she could get the words out. I used to think she was being strong. Now I think she was receiving a transmission she could not yet read, and her body was buying her the time to read it later. Which it did. It took years. Decades. Some of it I am still reading.
This is the shift I would offer you, if it’s useful. Not to stop honoring what your body has been through. The score is real. Your timeline matters. It deserves to be heard.
But to consider that the same body, in the same breath, is also reporting on your right now. On what is happening to you currently. On a present it is describing accurately, even when no one in the room will credit it.
Your body is not only an archive of what was done to you. It is a witness to what is true for you, today.
The work of receiving is small and ongoing. It is not a method. It’s closer to a posture. When something in your body shows up—the racing heart, the breath that will not deepen, the grief that arrives without warning on an ordinary Thursday afternoon—try, before you reach for the explanation, to just let the report into the room. Note what your body is telling you. Note that it is real. Then ask, with as little prejudgment as you can manage, what it might be reporting about right now.
Sometimes the answer is important and worth heeding—the thyroid, the depression, the thing you've been avoiding. And sometimes the answer is: nothing in particular. You slept badly. You drank the coffee. The body is just being a body today. Both are worth knowing. Neither requires you to build a story around it.
Don't try to make meaning of the signal—just listen to what the body is saying, in this moment, about this body, in this life.
If there is meaning, it’s yours to allow to emerge, in your own time, with your own clarity. The report is your body's to offer. To you
You don't have to fix what your body is telling you. You just have to receive it.
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with—not mine to answer, only yours:
What is your body telling you right now that you’ve been filing away as the past?
Further reading:
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Viking, 2014).
Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, and Karl Friston, The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (April 2026).
George Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (Basic Books, 2009).
Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006).
If you're new to narrative medicine, here's my own introduction to the practice:
Andrea Nakayama, "Exploring Narrative Medicine: A Personal Perspective," https://www.andreanakayama.com/resources/exploring-narrative-medicine-a-personal-perspective
