My brain knows I'm safe, but my body hasn't caught up yet

I made a mistake at work.

It wasn’t a big one. Nobody yelled at me. Nobody threatened my job. Nothing exploded. I could just tell someone was annoyed, and within seconds my body had already skipped ten steps ahead.

I’m about to get fired.

They finally figured it out.

I’ve been faking it this whole time.

The gag is, I know better.

I’ve been doing this job for over a decade. I’ve solved much harder problems than this. I know I’m good at what I do, and I know my self-worth isn’t tied to whether I make a mistake on a random Thursday afternoon. Logically, I knew I was okay.

But my body felt like it was about to get the belt.

I hate that feeling.

I hate that my brain can understand my self-worth isn’t at stake while my body acts like I’m about to be punished for my sins. And mind you, this wasn’t even that big of a mistake. I mean, I messed up. I’m not pretending I didn’t. It’s also something I’ve struggled with before, so I understand why someone would be frustrated. But the intensity of what I was feeling had almost nothing to do with what had actually happened.

Why does something so small make my body feel like I’m about to lose everything?

Why, after all these years, does one mistake still feel like evidence that I don’t belong?

Growing up in an immigrant family, I don’t remember anyone explicitly telling me that one mistake would ruin our lives. My parents never sat me down and said, “Don’t mess this up because everything depends on it.”

But that’s what it felt like.

When you’re building a life from scratch, everything feels fragile. One unexpected expense matters. One wrong decision matters. One thing going sideways can feel like it has consequences that ripple far beyond the moment itself. As a kid, I think I absorbed that without anyone ever having to explain it to me.

It felt like we had to keep getting it right for years before we were finally allowed to feel safe.

And we did.

It’s been thirty+ years.

My parents built a beautiful life. We have stability now. I’ve been in my career for over a decade. I have savings. I have incredible friends. I have opportunities I never imagined I’d have when I was younger.

Objectively, the life I’m living now looks nothing like the life my nervous system still thinks I’m living.

My brain knows we’ve made it, but my body still thinks we’re hanging on by a thread.

It’s almost impressive how creative my brain can be when it starts looking for evidence that I’m somehow not enough.

So instead of trying to reason my way out of it, I decided to do something different.

I sat there and started doing somatic shaking.

I scrunch up. My shoulders come forward, my head drops, and I cower. I looked like a little kid sitting in the corner waiting to find out how much trouble they were in.

Instead of arguing with it, I let it talk.

I started saying all the things I imagined that younger version of me was thinking:

“They’re mad at me.”

“They realized I’m an imposter.”

“They realized I’m lazy.”

“They realized I’m stupid.”

“They realized I’m not actually good at my job.”

“They realized I’ve been faking it.”

“They realized I’m not smart.”

I let myself make the little crying and whimpering sounds my body seemed to be holding onto. It felt incredibly embarrassing, even though I was completely alone.

I was reacting to something ancient.

I didn’t try to fix it or calm down. It had a right to be there just like any other emotion.

My breathing slowed down. My shoulders relaxed. The feeling didn’t disappear, but it softened enough that I could finally text my group of friends and tell them what had happened.

I already knew my self-worth wasn’t at stake.

My brain had been there the whole time. My body had just been screaming too loudly for me to hear it.

My body updates slower than logic.

My brain has spent years collecting evidence that I’m safe, even though my body is still looking at a map made decades ago.

It reminds me of a dog that has spent its whole life on a six-foot leash. You can clip on a thirty-foot one and bring it into an open field, but it will probably still walk close to you. It doesn’t know it has more room yet.

You can’t explain slack to a dog. You just keep walking with it until, eventually, it takes one more step than it usually does and realizes nothing pulled it back.

You just keep walking with it.

Eventually it reaches the place where it expects the leash to pull tight, but nothing happens. It takes another step, then another, and slowly it starts discovering that there’s more room than it realized.

I’ve spent years giving my brain evidence that I’m safe. I think my body is going to need more time.

So I’m trying not to drag it into the open field or get annoyed when it stays close. I’m just going to keep walking with it and reminding it, gently, that there’s more slack now.