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 it, but whatever i did never felt like enough. more responsibility followed, and i kept moving, adjusting, proving.

the first centre was filthy and residents had little purpose or structure. i set up cleaning rotas, organised repainting and tried to return some dignity to the space. colleagues said it would not work. it worked. over the following years i moved through several centres. during the syrian refugee crisis i helped establish an emergency centre in a former prison. i stood in those corridors and tried to explain to people who had fled detention and violence why they were being asked to live there. i 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.

after the burnout, i 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 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. 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, including holistic pulsing: a held rhythm carried through the hands and received through the body. there are no words. i create the space and maintain the rhythm. i learned to stay present without taking someone else in, to 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: my stomach still tightens in crowds. 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.