When Your Body Says Stop and Your Mind Says Keep Going

by Rebecca Bloom

There is a conflict inside me that I feel almost every day. My mind tells me to keep moving. Keep trying. Keep proving I am fine. Keep being useful so no one has a reason to leave. But my body says something entirely different. It says stop. It says slow down. It says I cannot carry this anymore.

For years I believed my mind. It was louder. Sharper. More familiar. It carried the rules of my childhood. Be helpful. Be calm. Be good. Do not rest unless everything is finished. Do not need anything.

My body had no room in that world. It tried to speak and I ignored it. A headache. A tight chest. A heaviness behind the eyes. Early signs that something inside me needed attention. I pushed them aside and kept going.

When rheumatoid arthritis entered my life, everything changed. My body could no longer be silenced. It stopped cooperating with the old rules. It flared. It ached. It collapsed in ways that forced me to notice the pain I had dismissed for years.

At first I was angry with my body. I thought it was betraying me. I thought it was making life harder for no reason. But slowly, as I listened, I realised something else. My body was not betraying me. It was protecting me. It was pulling me away from a pace that was destroying me.

Now the conflict between my mind and body feels like two versions of me speaking. The child who learned to earn her place. And the adult who is trying to learn how to live.

When my mind says keep going, I pause. When my body says stop, I try to honour it. Not perfectly. But honestly.

This is the truth I keep returning to. My body is not the enemy. It is the part of me that never learned to lie. It tells the truth even when my mind wants to avoid it. It asks for what I never asked for. It remembers what I tried to forget. And sometimes it forces me to slow down because it knows what I need before I do.

I am still learning how to listen. But every time I choose my body over my old survival patterns, I move closer to a life that feels human instead of exhausting.

Rebecca Bloom