Apparently My Body Didn’t Sign the Renewal Contract

My hands quit, my words wander, and I’m just trying to keep up.

I don’t really know how to talk about this yet.

It started as a whisper. Just a little discomfort in my fingers, a twinge when writing. Then it got louder. Pain when journaling. Cramping when crafting. Just today, writing checks, I made it to the fifth one and suddenly couldn’t move my hands. Yes, people still use paper checks.

Apparently, my joints are over paperwork.

They didn’t swell. They didn’t stiffen like I imagine arthritis would. They just... stopped, locked. Like a slow, quiet mutiny.

The truth is, I noticed it months ago. When I was making magic wands and suddenly found myself setting them aside like an abandoned “hobby”, even though I didn’t want to. When I stopped journaling with a pen and told myself it was just a break. When I quietly let go of rituals I loved because my body wouldn’t cooperate.

I told myself it was temporary. That maybe I’d slept weird. That maybe I was being dramatic. You know, classic denial with a side of magical thinking.

But it’s not just my hands.

Lately, I’ve been losing my words, too.

Not in the usual “brain fog” kind of way.

More like a total system reboot mid-sentence.

I’ll forget a name I know by heart. I’ll stare into space searching for a word that used to live at the tip of my tongue. Sometimes I just stall completely, cursor blinking, mouth half-open, nothing loading.

Which, let me tell you, is real cute when your entire identity has been built on being articulate.

💬 Reading this and nodding along?

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Because yeah, my brain has always been my anchor.

Being sharp, being fast, being good with words, that’s how I survived. That’s how I made sense of myself.

So when the words don’t show up, it doesn’t just feel frustrating. It feels like I’m disappearing in real time.

But here’s the surprising part:

This hasn’t triggered my health anxiety.

I haven’t gone down a WebMD rabbit hole. I’m not scanning my symptoms against 17 rare neurological disorders. I’m not spiraling, I’m not even doom-scrolling.

It’s not worry. It’s just… witnessing.

There’s fear, sure. There’s grief.

But mostly there’s this strange, calm curiosity.

Like I’m standing at the edge of something and thinking, Huh. So this is what 40-something in a mystery body feels like.

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Eventually, I made peace with journaling digitally.

I resisted it for longer than I’d like to admit. I love the scratch of pen on paper, the way my handwriting felt like a signature of my soul, changing with my emotions.

But when your fingers go on strike, your only real option is to start typing or become very emotionally invested in voice memos.

So I adapted. Because I needed to keep writing. I needed to stay connected to myself.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to.

There’s a kind of grief that shows up not when something dies, but when something just… quietly stops working the way it used to.

The rituals.

The words.

The parts of your body you didn’t realize were sacred until they went rogue.

Nobody warned me about these changes.

It’s not dramatic. It’s not a medical emergency.

But it still rearranges you.

What do we do when our body starts saying no?

What do we do when the mind we’ve always relied on starts forgetting things like, oh I don’t know, basic nouns?

I don’t have an answer.

Just a soft truth I’m sitting with:

I’m not falling apart. I’m just… changing.

And I don’t know that I want to fight that.

I want to stay in relationship with it.

Even when it’s inconvenient.

Even when it feels like I’m ghosting myself.

So if you’re in a season where your body or your brain feels a little less like home, I just want you to know:

You’re not alone.

You’re not broken.

You’re just becoming someone new.

And sometimes, that means getting reacquainted with a version of yourself that types more than she writes and occasionally forgets what she came into the room for.

Welcome to the club. We meet in the kitchen.

If you can remember why you came in.

Love today,

Heather 🌸

👋 I’d love to hear from you.

Have your hands mutinied lately?

Brain buffering mid-thought?

If your body or mind has started pulling tricks of its own, I want to know:

What’s changing for you right now—and how are you making peace with it?