Body as a Witness

I’m sitting in my car at the end of a 12-hour clinic day, my head pounding, trying not to cry before I start the drive home. I press record.

It became a ritual that first year working as a Certified Nurse Midwife—voice memos on my commute, a way to empty out the day before I walked back into my life. Between 2021 and 2023, I recorded more than 200 of them. I haven’t listened to most of them until recently.

They were born during one of my heaviest seasons—days that broke me down, lifted me up, and wore me thin—and I didn’t see the point in opening Pandora’s box.

Until now.

I’ve recently taken on what might be the most challenging and meaningful role of my career so far: midwifing myself back to joy. After decades of living in survival mode, I’m learning how to be present in my own life. That kind of work asks for rawness and honesty. It asks me to revisit what I’ve avoided. So I summoned the courage to listen to a few at a time during my daily nature walks.

To summarize, they remind me how deeply I love midwifery, how its philosophy is woven deep into my being. There’s a lot of joy in being able to embody this work; I love my patients, my colleagues, the sacredness of birth. I hear pride mixed with exhaustion in my voice after pushing through a migraine to see twenty patients in a single clinic day. I hear the twinge of shame in my shaking voice the day I unexpectedly got my period at work and bled through my scrubs, needing to ask a physician to step in so I could clean myself up. I hear the fear under my raspy sore throat, recounting the night I developed COVID symptoms mid-shift. The hospital ran such a tight ship there was no other midwife available to cover, so I double masked and prayed I wouldn’t harm the very people I was there to care for.

I hear someone trying so hard to be excellent. To be dependable. To handle it all.

And beneath that, I hear something else.

At the time, I knew things weren’t right. The midwives were underpaid and undermined. We were scheduled for eight-hour clinic days and routinely worked ten or twelve. There was just enough staff to keep the hospital running, but not enough to absorb illness, emergencies, or the basic reality of being human. The physicians—brilliant, skilled—were stretched thin and treated as interchangeable. The system demanded constant output, leaving no room to reflect, to improve, to ensure patients consistently received respectful, thoughtful care.

There were days we didn’t have interpreters. We didn’t have appropriate equipment for people in larger bodies. Educational materials centered cisgender, heteronormative experiences. Our entire midwifery team was white, in a community that wasn’t. We were constantly told to do more with less in a hospital system that pays its CEO upwards of 11million per year.

None of this was hidden. It was simply normalized.

I stayed for a year. Before I left, I helped organize a union alongside midwives, physicians, and nurses. I believed—and still believe—that better pay and working conditions could create space for something more humane. Fewer hours. More presence. The capacity to care well, not just efficiently.

It felt like a step in the right direction. And still, I’m not sure these systems are built to be reformed. But at the time, it was what we had.

Listening back now, I feel an almost overwhelming tenderness toward the version of me in those recordings. I love her. I respect her. I understand why she kept going.

But I can also hear a voice that went largely unacknowledged then—the voice of my body.

In memo after memo, I am negotiating with it. Pushing past it. Silencing it.

My body is in pain, and I keep working.
My body is bleeding, and I keep working.
My body is exhausted, anxious, depleted—and I keep working.

It felt like a series of impossible choices: my patients or myself. My job or my health. My reliability or my limits.

I had been taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that being good at this work meant enduring. Showing up no matter what. Being the kind of clinician others could count on. I wanted that reputation. I wanted to be excellent.

So I pushed through.

And the cost kept rising.

The migraines became more frequent, more severe. Anxiety settled into a near-constant hum. After night shifts, I would be incapacitated for days, my body struggling to recover while hot flashes woke me at 3 a.m. again and again. There was no room in the system to account for any of this. And so I didn’t, either.

Our culture doesn’t teach us to listen to the body as a source of knowledge. It teaches us to manage it. Override it. Medicate it into compliance so we can keep going by whatever means possible.  

But listening back, knowing myself as intimately as I do now, I can hear what I couldn’t then.

My body wasn’t failing me.

It was telling the truth.

It knew what I didn’t yet have the capacity to fully see: that the conditions I was working in were not sustainable. Not for me. Not for my colleagues. Not for the patients we were trying so hard to serve well.

I used to think I was choosing between myself and my patients. Between my body and my work.

But my body was never the barrier.

It was the witness.