Why This Isn't The Tome
An honest confession. Remembering the body needs space.
I tried to write this somewhere else. That’s probably the most honest place to start.
For months, I sat down intending to write the next piece for The Tome, the place where I’ve been tracing memory, meaning, architecture, and the inner scaffolding of how I became who I am. That space has held a lot. It’s held charged memories. It’s held careful examinations. It’s held moments where language needed to be exact so nothing collapsed under the weight of it. But every time I approached the body, really approached it, I felt something tighten. Not resistance exactly.
Pressure.
I kept telling myself I could handle it in a post or two. That I could fold the body into the existing structure. Slot it neatly between stories and analysis. Give it a chapter, a section, a moment. And every time I tried, it felt off.
Disingenuous.
Not because the words were wrong, but because the container was. The body doesn’t speak in excerpts. It doesn’t like being summarized. It doesn’t want to be referenced in passing and then ushered aside so the mind can keep moving.
What I felt, over and over, was the strain of trying to compress something enormous into something polite. Like forcing breath into a space that couldn’t expand. Like asking the body to lower its voice so the room could stay orderly. The more I tried to make it fit, the more obvious it became that I was doing something I’ve done before: respecting the truth intellectually while ignoring it somatically.
The pressure built. Frustration followed. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that shows up as stalled writing, false starts, and that subtle sense of lying to yourself by omission. I knew better; my body knew better. And then I stopped trying to force it.
The moment I decided the body didn’t belong as a subsection, but as its own space entirely, something shifted immediately. The pressure released. The image sharpened. What had felt frustratingly blurry snapped into focus, like someone finally adjusted the lens to match the depth of the subject. This wasn’t a branding decision. It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t a new direction so much as an honest correction.
The body needed its own room. Not to be displayed. Not to be fixed. Not to be explained away or turned into a lesson. But to breathe.
Talk About Body (TAB) exists because trying to speak honestly about embodiment inside The Tome felt like offering scraps to something vast. Like pretending a couple of well-written posts could carry the full register of sensation, desire, confusion, pleasure, frustration, and lived reality that the body holds. They couldn’t. And pretending they could felt like a betrayal, subtle, but real.
This space isn’t cleaner. It isn’t safer. It isn’t more refined. It’s simply more honest.
What’s written here won’t be calibrated for comfort or presentation. It won’t be reduced to “insights” or dressed up as instruction. I’ll speak clearly, not to impress, but to cut through.
Precision, for me, isn’t polish. It’s how I avoid hiding.
I’ll speak emotionally and logically, but not clinically. This isn’t a case study. It’s lived experience, voiced with care and discernment, not to overwhelm, not to shock, not to perform, but to tell the truth as faithfully as I can from inside my own skin.
This isn’t TMI. It’s about reality. Truth, when spoken without agenda, doesn’t offend. It offers a mirror. A magnifying glass. A chance to see yourself more clearly, not because you’re being instructed, but because something in you recognizes what’s being named.
I’m not writing from a pedestal. I’m not ahead of you. I’m not finished. I’m writing from the middle, from a body that’s still learning how to listen to itself and speak without distortion. If anything here resonates, let it be an invitation, not a demand.
Sit with it. Turn it over. See what it stirs.
Some things need architecture. Some things need silence. And some things—like the body—need space.
This is that space.
—Jeff
Leaving this TAB open.