the body knows

walking into a refugee centre for the first time felt familiar. i had grown up in uganda and ethiopia, moved through intercultural spaces as a child without thinking twice about it. the languages, the food smells, the way people held themselves in unfamiliar situations: none of it was foreign to me. i felt at home in a way most of my dutch colleagues didn’t, and i used that immediately. it helped me at first, and cost me later.

the work began part time. within weeks i was hired permanently. my managers told me i was good at the work, and i had to take their word for it. i did not have that measure of myself. whatever i did, it never felt like enough. the promotions came regardless: support worker, youth worker, programme coordinator. i accepted each one and kept going. i didn’t yet have a name for that drive. i just kept moving, kept adjusting, kept proving.

the first centre needed work. it was filthy and residents had little purpose or structure. i set up cleaning rotas, organised repainting of the halls, tried to return some dignity to a space that had lost it. colleagues said it wouldn’t work. it worked. over the following years i moved through five or six centres, each resistant in its own way. additional responsibilities followed. during the syrian refugee crisis i helped set up an emergency centre in a former prison. i stood in those corridors and tried to find words to explain to people who had fled detention and violence why they were being asked to live there. i kept going. and kept going.

while i managed the system, the body was keeping score. migraines worsened. weight gathered. my stomach would tighten on the way to work before i even knew why. i needed more recovery time after each shift. the anger was closer to the surface. the restlessness wouldn’t settle.

what i was working with was this: people carrying war trauma, family trauma, the trauma of long uncertainty. those conditions produced their own behaviours: aggression, manipulation, and forms of distance that goodwill alone couldn’t bridge. some had also learned, through circumstance more than choice, that performing need opened more doors than stating it plainly. i understood more of it than most of my colleagues did. i had grown up around displacement, though in a very different context. and i kept giving, because giving more always felt like the price of being of use.

the warning signs crept up loudly but i ignored them. i noticed that their crying no longer affected me. their stories, which had once moved me, passed through without leaving a mark. i had watched colleagues reach that point and keep working. i knew what it meant and i kept working too.

the burnout came. i was on the hard cold floor of my apartment, unable to get up.

i went back to work too soon, minimised what had happened, and returned still numb. the floor just confirmed it.

i could not keep living like that.

i had been reading about the history of cave art and the role of ancient hallucinogenic plant medicines in human creativity and consciousness. i thought about it for a year and a half before deciding to go. when i finally went on an ayahuasca retreat in brazil, in one ceremony i had a vision of my hands: buzzing, pulsing, not solid but open, as if they were simply channels for something moving through them without effort. it was joyful and purposeful in a way nothing in my working life was at that point. i carried that vision with me. sometime later i came across an integrative massage course and felt immediately that i needed to take it. my hands were instruments, not for managing systems, but for creating.

sports massage had come first. what followed was holistic massage, which included something called holistic pulsing. pulsing is a held rhythm carried through the hands and received through the body. there are no words. nothing is explained or solved. i just create the space and maintain the rhythm. what i found there was space. nothing had to be managed. something could surface on its own terms.

i kept overstepping, taking on what was not mine to carry. there was no room left to feel my own feelings. in pulsing that changed. nothing was asked for, explained, or solved. i learned to stay present without taking someone else in. i could be there without carrying it for them. that changed how i work, in the studio and with people.

i left the netherlands eight years ago. i met shaun, left my job, my apartment, and started again. what social work cost me is real: an aversion to crowds, to feeling trapped, to large groups of people. the ease i once felt in the world is harder to find now. it is not gone but it is not where it was. the massage practice never resumed. the burnout closed that door too, and i haven’t reopened it yet. what the training gave me didn’t disappear with it. it moved into the work, into the studio, into how i look at a figure and what i am trying to find there.

what it gave me is also real. a precise and unromantic understanding of human nature. the choices people make, the dynamics they create, what it looks like when a person cannot or will not fill their own emptiness, and what it costs the people around them.

this is where my attention is moving now. when i sit before a figure, in clay or on canvas, i want to read what the body is actually doing: where it holds, where it braces, where the tension lives. not what a person says of themselves, but what the body shows without intending to. i want to stay with what is there without deciding too quickly what it means. the moment that interests me is when holding together stops and something unguarded comes through.

the body knows that moment. i am trying to make it visible.