Last week I asked you this:
What did the ten year old version of you love before she learned to make herself acceptable? And is any part of that still waiting to be picked back up?
Before I answer I want to offer you something first.
A lot of you wrote back. And what I heard most was this. I can't remember. I don't know. My brain just goes blank when I try to go there.
I want to offer you some grace around that.
Questioning our lives is actually quite new for most of us. We are not taught to do it. We are taught to get on with it. So when I ask you to reach back to a ten year old girl and ask her what she loved, and your mind comes up empty, that is not failure. That is just a muscle that hasn't been asked to work in a very long time.
Don't go hunting for the answer. Let it float. You know that feeling when you're trying to remember a name and the harder you chase it the further it runs? And then the moment you let it go, there it is, arriving quietly while you're making tea or staring out a window. These questions work the same way. The answer is not in your head. It is in your body. And your body will tell you when it's ready.
I also want to gently push back on something I saw on Instagram when I asked this question. A lot of surface answers came through. Skating. Playing. I want to invite you to go a little deeper. Not what did you do at ten but what made you forget that time existed. What made you lose yourself completely. And here is the real question underneath it all: are you still doing it? Because if your life is missing joy right now, the ten year old might already know exactly where you left it.
Here is my answer. And it did not come easily.
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Going back is not about finding blame. It is about finding her.
My father died when I was ten years old.
He was a severe alcoholic. My parents had separated when I was five. I was eight years behind all of my siblings, four of them, essentially living in a different era of our family. By the time my father died the oldest was married and had children of her own. They were all out of the house. And I was ten and alone in a way that nobody around me had the language for.
It was the 1970s. We did not ask what a child might be feeling. My father's death was, to everyone around me, a relief. A blessing. That was the word used.
One of my siblings looked at me crying and said: why are you crying? You barely knew him.
So I stopped. I locked the door on those years and kept moving the way I had been shown to keep moving. And those memories went somewhere quiet and stayed there for a long time.
I can tell you one thing I never lost. The moment I found out he died. I can still see exactly where I was standing. I can still see what I was wearing. Some moments burn themselves into the body and stay there whether you want them to or not.
It wasn't until years later, in a weekend workshop, that I finally opened the door to that ten year old girl and sat with her long enough to ask what she actually loved.
What I found surprised me with how simple it was.
She loved to make people laugh. To entertain. To hold a room in a way she didn't have a name for yet but could feel in her whole body. She was the bossy one, her friends called her that, the one who naturally pulled everyone around her into something, usually involving boys and usually up to no good :) Speaking, performing, advising, being at the front of the room. That was where she felt most herself.
She also loved nature in a way that went bone deep. My favourite memories from those years are piling into cars with my teenage siblings and heading to a local pond. And the water. To this day when I feel lost the best thing I can do is hike in the woods or swim in a lake. In that water I feel peace and joy and something I can only describe as God's presence. The water has always known me.
Going back to find her is not about blame. It is not about pointing fingers at the people who told you to stop crying or be quiet or make yourself smaller. It is simply about finding the girl who knew exactly who she was before the world got to her. She is still there. And she has been waiting patiently for you to come back and get her.
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Is your body keeping score?
Recently I sat with a woman whose story will become one of the episodes of The Crone Stories. She was describing her journey through somatic therapy and how it had helped her navigate a significant physical condition. And in one of those sessions something arrived that she had not been looking for.
A memory. Her father telling her to be quiet. Not gently. Sternly. The kind of tone that lands in a child's body like a verdict.
And in that moment, without consciously deciding to, she learned to stuff it all down. To make herself smaller. To take up less sound in the world. Her body received that instruction and kept it, quietly and faithfully, for decades.
I heard her story and felt the echo of my own.
My father died when I was ten and nobody asked what I was feeling. And so I stopped feeling it, or tried to. My body took the weight of what my mind could not process and held it there, waiting for me to be ready.
We do this. All of us. The body is extraordinarily loyal. It will carry what we cannot yet face for as long as we need it to. But that loyalty has a cost. It lives in our shoulders, our hips, our gut, our chest. It lives in the places we brace and the places we go numb. It lives in the exhaustion that has no obvious cause and the anxiety that arrives without warning.
A book that really resonated with me was Bessel van der Kolk book “ The body keeps the score” he spent decades researching exactly this. It changed the conversation about trauma permanently. His central finding is both simple and profound. Trauma is not stored as a narrative in the mind. It is stored as a physical experience in the body. And because it lives in the body, talking about it is often not enough to release it. The body needs its own language. Its own path through.
That path looks different for everyone.
I have found mine in pieces over the years. EFT, tapping on meridian points while sitting with what the body is holding. Gestalt work, which is where I first met my ten year old self and finally asked her what she needed. Rolfing, deep structural bodywork that releases what has been gripped in the connective tissue for years. Body Talk, which works with the body's own intelligence to find where communication has broken down and gently restore it.
None of these are magic. All of them asked something of me. They asked me to stop managing and start feeling. To stop explaining and start listening.
And I know that not everyone has access to a somatic practitioner or the budget for that kind of work right now. So let me offer you something simpler.
Walk. Move your body in any way that gets you out of your head and into your physical self. And if you want my honest favourite, turn the music up. All the way up. And dance. Not choreographed, not careful, not pretty. Full body, full volume, completely alone in your kitchen if you need to be. There is something about music moving through a body that bypasses every defence we have built and goes straight to what is true. It is somatic therapy in disguise. And it is free.
The ten year old who locked her memories away did the best she could with what she had. She was protecting you. But you are not ten anymore. And you are allowed to go back and get her.
Not to find blame. Just to find her.
There is no shame in having a guide for that journey. A therapist, a somatic practitioner, someone who has walked this territory before and can help you find your footing when the ground gets unsteady. And there is also no shame in starting with a kitchen dance party at full volume.
Both count. Both work. Start somewhere.
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Your question for next week
Here is your question to carry this week:
Where in your body do you feel it first when something is wrong? Not what you think. Not what you say. Where does your body speak before your mind catches up? And have you ever stopped long enough to listen to what it is trying to tell you?
Sit with it. Reply if something moves in you and I will answer it myself next week.
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If you want to start hearing her again, the Unearth Your Yes questions are waiting for you at www.karenamy.com/free-guide
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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.
In love, light and laughter — Karen