Learning to Hear What My Skin Is Saying
My skin had been telling the truth all along, but I had been too busy performing calm to hear it.
For most of my life, I treated my skin as a border. Something that kept the world out and me safely contained inside. It was armour, a surface to clean, cover, hide, decorate. I did not think of it as something that spoke. Only as something that was looked at.
Then one day, I started listening. Noticing the language it used. The small flinches, the goosebumps, the pulse that jumped when someone’s hand came too close. The warmth that lingered after kindness. The chill that followed a careless word. My skin had been telling the truth all along, but I had been too busy performing calm to hear it.
The body is rarely subtle. It whispers first, then shouts. A flush rising up the neck, a tightening in the shoulders, the slow retreat of breath. These are its sentences. Its grammar is pressure and pulse. When the body wants, it leans forward. When it fears, it folds. I used to mistake these reactions for weakness. Now I see them as translations.
Learning to hear what my skin is saying has meant unlearning the idea that my body must always agree with my intentions. Sometimes my mouth says yes, while my skin screams no. Sometimes it wants more than I can admit. There is truth in those contradictions. The body is not disloyal. It is simply honest.
When I touch someone now, or let them touch me, I listen for the conversation underneath. Does my skin reach, or recoil? Does it soften or brace? If I pay attention, I always know.
There is power in listening before speaking, in pausing before explaining away a feeling. The skin does not care about logic. It responds to safety, to care, to presence. When it feels seen, it opens. When it feels ignored, it goes silent.
Some people call it instinct. I call it memory. Every touch the body has ever known lives there. The good ones bloom like warmth under the ribs. The bad ones sit cold and heavy until we name them. Listening is the only way to tell the difference.
To hear what my skin is saying is to return to myself. To stop treating the body as scenery and start treating it as witness. Every shiver, every rise of hair, every tremor is a kind of truth.
When I finally began to listen, I realised my skin had never betrayed me. It had been speaking in its own language all along. I was just too afraid to believe what it was saying.
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