A Continual Return
February Newsletter
Last week, I underwent jaw surgery.
During an MRI intended to monitor a growth behind my left eye, the scan revealed something unexpected—an abnormal growth on the right side of my jaw. At first, they thought it was a cyst, and surgery was quickly scheduled to remove it. It all felt oddly procedural, the way medical interventions often do. But beneath the logistical ease, something deeper stirred. This wasn’t my jaw’s first battle, and it wasn’t the first time it carried the weight of a larger story.
When I was a teenager, my jaw was dislocated during an act of domestic violence. I had broken up with my boyfriend, and in retaliation, his two teammates attacked me.
That night marked the beginning of a long and complicated relationship with my jaw.
The injuries it endured became a silent witness to the trauma I carried. My jaw held more than physical pain—it held the imprint of violence, grief, and fear, a weight I didn’t yet have the tools to process. In my twenties, I cycled through two rounds of braces, physiotherapy, and endless treatments to address the lingering effects of that violence. Each intervention promised relief, but I soon realized healing wasn’t as simple as fixing the structural damage.
Eventually, the pain subsided, and I believed the chapter was closed. I wanted it to be closed. But years later, after fainting and hitting my jaw again, the pain returned—persistent and unrelenting, as if my body refused to let me move on without fully reckoning with what had been stored there.
This most recent surgery felt like another reckoning. Before removing the growth, my surgeon suggested flushing the joints on the opposite side of my jaw to ease the chronic pain that had become an unwelcome companion in my life.
I agreed.
What I didn’t expect was for the surgery to unlock something far deeper than physical pain. As the anesthesia took hold, I was transported back to that night. I became my teenage self again, reliving the fear, the panic, and the searing pain as if no time had passed. The surgeon worked on the very parts of my jaw that had absorbed the blows nearly 15 years ago, and as he did, my body released memories it had never felt safe enough to surface before.
When I woke up, I was crying.
The tears weren’t just for the physical pain. They were for her—the girl I had been. I wanted to go back and hold her, to tell her she didn’t need to be brave, that it was okay to feel the weight of her grief and the tenderness of her pain. I wanted her to know that she wasn’t alone—that she had never been alone, even if it felt that way.
In the days since the surgery, the unexpected has continued to unfold. The growth they believed to be a cyst turned out to be something else entirely. Now, I wait for answers, sitting with the uncertainty and letting it exist without demanding resolution. Strangely, the waiting feels less heavy than I thought it might. This is because the heart that lives inside my body feels different. My jaw, a part of me that has carried so much, is softening. My face feels lighter. My breath moves deeper into my chest, and my heart feels steadier, fuller—more here.
When I look in the mirror, I see a face that is slowly becoming mine again. It’s a face that feels familiar, like the one I had before my body learned the language of violence.
And again, my body teaches me that it will hold onto what it needs until it feels safe enough to release the truth stored within its sacred skin. And I am learning that healing doesn’t always come through therapy or a carefully planned process. Sometimes, it arrives in the most unexpected ways.
For me, this past year, healing has meant laying my body on the surgery table and trusting men to be gentle, kind, and caring with my most vulnerable self. It has been practicing the open-heartedness I encourage my clients to explore—a deep trust that things can and will be different this time, despite how scared our hearts are.