Life surprises you. Even in collapse—physical, emotional, or spiritual—the most unexpected comfort can break through. I know this because 30days ago, I admitted myself to a psychiatric ward. I was no longer safe in my body, yet my body insisted on survival.

Where many women feel estranged from their bodies, I had, in recent years, sought refuge in mine. When chronic pain forced me onto a cane, I turned to Pilates. Six months later, the cane and the pain were gone. My body had learned a new way to move.

But that triumph gave way to a different battle. I had “developed” PMDD. In truth, my body was storing every trauma I had refused to process, and PMDD was born. Like the women before me—women of Amazonian perseverance—I had learned to “nut the fuck up” and power through. Yet the body, while brilliant, is not a machine. It is a living, breathing keeper of the soul.

A woman’s body is a miracle. It once held my child self. It is large enough to grow another human. Stretch marks bear witness to growth. Curves have inspired marble masterpieces. We are not random arrangements of carbon and water. We are proof of survival, and the literal vessels that grow future generations.

On my last trip to my hometown of Los Angeles, my body reminded me of that truth. My spirit was exhausted and screamed for death, but my body curled into the fetal position, refusing to move. Spirit wanted a quick escape; body remembered my values—strength, health, survival. Body won.

Now, with distance, I see that my collapse was not a breakdown but a reckoning. I was one of billions of women who have crumbled under the weight of an unfair world. The world has teeth. It is unforgiving. I am an optimist, but I am also a realist.

We live in cities without empathy, even as advertisements urge us to “care for others.” We hand our elders to corporations, trusting underpaid workers to meet their most basic needs, while imagining our own futures will be different. We fail to teach our children history, then repeat the same political and social mistakes that have plagued humanity for millennia.

In Afghanistan, women are being erased from public life in the most brazen, horrifying ways, yet in America, we act as if we are the most oppressed women in the world. The dissonance is deafening. The contradictions unbearable. Even strong shoulders can carry only so much.

Still, my body carries me. Our bodies carry all of us. Even in collapse, they remember their deepest purpose: to live, to endure, and to hold us until we can rise again.