💔 Saturday Substack
Sunday Morning in Nashville: A Meditation on Violence, Body, and Repair
⚠️ Content Note
This post contains a description of gendered and anti-trans violence. Please move at your own pace.
If at any moment you feel your body tighten or your breath shorten, pause. Step away, breathe, or return when you feel resourced.
You are not alone in this story.
“The body keeps the score, but it also keeps the story.”
— Resmaa Menakem
On Sunday morning, October 5, 2025, around 9 a.m., I landed in Nashville.
I had done what I’ve done for years—navigated travel as a trans person with bathroom anxiety, always calculating safety, always scanning. I usually find a family restroom, the quiet kind that offers privacy and pause. But this time, I found a restroom that seemed empty. I exhaled. I stepped inside.
In less than four seconds, everything changed.
Photo courtesy of Chloë Sucena
I made brief eye contact with the only other person there, and before I could orient myself, I was shoved—hard—into the urinal wall and kicked in the pelvis. Shock rippled through me. Then silence. When I looked up, I was alone.
I left, retrieved my suitcase, and went outside to wait for my ride. I remember my breath catching and then returning. I remember the pain settling in my hips. I remember wondering what could have prevented this, what I could have done differently. That question still echoes, even though I know the truth: there is nothing I could have done. Violence is never earned. It simply erupts out of the fractures of our unhealed world.
This week, I’ve been in a three-day Somatic Intensive in Experiential Narrative Practice, and I’ve been sitting with what it means to let the body speak the unspeakable.
My body is both witness and archive. It holds memory, pain, fear, and, somehow, the faint pulse of resilience.
For three days, I clawed my way out of the spiral.
The first two were spent half here, half gone—dissociated, sleepless, untethered. My body bled. My pelvis throbbed. My hips, misaligned, told the story before my mouth could.
I was enrolled in the Intensive, and so I let lament lead the way. I wept. I let my grief breathe. I let fifteen strangers become a soft net of witnessing. I told my partner what had happened, only in outlines. Then I texted a few beloveds, letting them hold the story as I clawed toward daylight.
For years, anger and rage have been my bodyguards—protective, vigilant, necessary. But this time, I chose differently. I let community resilience be my guard. I let collective breath hold me where I could not hold myself.
During one of the sessions, I wrote a poem—an acrostic meditation on the word Rage.
It came from somewhere deep inside, a place that still believes in possibility:
Photo Courtesy of Chloë Sucena
Rage, an acrostic Poem
Running away from danger led me to internalize rage.
Away from all of who & what I know, estranged from myself.
Going deep into what is lodged in my body to rediscover myself.
Exiled to the North, now rooting into another possible world.
I wrote these words with trembling hands. They became a map back to myself—
each line a reminder that exile and rooting are not opposites,
but coordinates on the same pilgrimage of repair.
I keep returning to the breath, to the slow repair of the nervous system,
to the tender truth that we cannot think our way out of trauma—
we must feel our way through it, together.
And yet, I cannot ignore the wider landscape.
Gender-based violence has accelerated.
Across this country and beyond, trans and gender-expansive people are being surveilled, legislated against, and attacked for existing. Violence is not random—it is patterned, sanctioned, and socialized. It’s the predictable outcome of a culture that confuses difference with danger and power with worth.
Our collective nervous system is frayed. We are all absorbing too much violence—systemic, spiritual, interpersonal. Our bodies know this. They tremble with it. They ache for relief.
I want to believe that we can find another way.
That we can learn to stay with the discomfort of difference without reaching for domination.
That we can re-pattern our reflexes from defense to curiosity.
That we can learn to care for each other’s bodies as extensions of our own.
I share this not for sympathy, but for solidarity—for anyone who has been afraid to enter a bathroom, to travel, to take up space in their own body.
I share this because stories like this live in too many of us, unnamed and unhealed.
If we are to survive this time, we must build practices of care fierce enough to meet violence and soft enough to hold its aftermath.
So today, I’m breathing.
I’m tending.
I’m letting the story move through me—not to erase the pain, but to remind myself:
I am still here.
Photo Courtesy of Max Heaton
🌿 Ritual Exhale
If you are reading this and your body tightens, pause.
Place one hand on your heart, one on your belly.
Inhale for four counts.
Exhale for six.
Say quietly to yourself: I am safe in this moment. My breath belongs to me.
Reflection Questions for the Collective
What does safety feel like in your body today?
How might we build communities that regulate, not replicate, harm?
What practices help you return to yourself after shock or fear?
🌾 Afterword: Toward Collective Repair
bell hooks wrote that “love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
And adrienne maree brown reminds us that “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”
These words are not abstractions to me; they are coordinates.
They help me locate myself in the landscape of repair.
Each breath, each act of tenderness, each choice to stay curious when fear surges—
these are the small-scale revolutions that shape the collective nervous system.
They are how we repattern the world, cell by cell, story by story.
Fred Moten teaches that we live in “the break,” in the space between rupture and relation.
That’s where I find myself now—still bruised, still healing, but listening for the music that hums beneath the fracture.
The work of repair is never linear. It’s circular, spiralic, fugitive.
It asks that we keep turning toward one another,
even when the world teaches us to look away.
If violence fractures the story, then love—tender, fierce, communal—mends it.
Not perfectly, not once and for all, but again and again.
Through breath. Through care. Through the remembering that our survival is braided together.
This, too, is theology:
not a doctrine of certainty,
but a practice of becoming—
in flesh, in breath, in the trembling beauty of being alive.
✨ Benediction
May our bodies remember what the world forgets:
that love is stronger than fear,
and repair is our shared liturgy.
— RCE+
Oh, friend. I am so sorry this happened to you. Holding you in the light, and re-commiting to doing this work with you.