ISSUE 003
A small note before I begin: these are moving to Sundays. It suits the letter better.
Last week I told you where I was on a September morning twenty-five years ago, and that afterward my body would react to a sound before my mind knew why.
Here is what I did about it. I want you to know, because I got it wrong for four years.
I went looking for the answer outside myself.
Doctors. Appointments. Medication for emotions I did not understand and could not name. I was twenty-five years old, alone in a country that was not mine, and I did not have the language for what had happened to me. So I did not describe it. I described symptoms.
And nobody asked. Not one of them asked what my body had been through.
I do not blame them for that, and I am not telling you medication is wrong. For many women it is exactly right. What I am telling you is that I was treated for a problem I did not have, because the problem I did have never made it into the room.
My body rejected it almost immediately. I overrode that too.
All the while, something quieter was telling me what to do. Breathe. Stay calm. That was it. That was the whole instruction, and I dismissed it for four years because it was not clinical enough to be an answer.
You already know what I know now — the nerve, the little brain in the heart, the traffic running upward. My body was not malfunctioning. It was reporting.
And here is the part that took me longest.
I was chasing modeling. The stage, the runway, the shoots. I grew up on stages — ballet, theater, Italian folklore, since I was a child — and it was the only life I had ever imagined for myself.
Somewhere in those four years, it stopped meaning anything.
That was the truth my body was trying to hand me, and I could not take it. So I decided the refusal was the problem. I went looking for someone to make it stop, because the alternative was admitting the dream I had crossed an ocean for was no longer mine.
What those four years cost me. More money than I want to write down. Years of headaches. And the one I still count as the real loss — my ability to feel joy. I got it back. It took far longer than it needed to.
Then I stopped asking who could fix me and started asking what was actually happening inside my body. Nutrition school. Then the science, properly. And I never stopped.
Not a detour from this work. The reason for it.
One thing for today. When your body resists something — a role, a schedule, a room you keep dreading — ask one question before you look for a way to manage it:
Is this a problem to solve, or an answer I do not want yet?
Sit with it longer than is comfortable. The answer usually arrives in the second minute, not the first.
If you know what I am describing, reply and tell me what your body has been saying that you have not wanted to hear. I read every one myself.
Cheers to a bella vita, sempre.
Maria Antonietta
Sempre Bella · The Executive Aesthetic™
