The Body Knows First
The Body Knows First
This is for every woman who was blamed for the fire in her body before she ever lit the match.
I didn’t ask for this body.
Not its shape, not its appetite.
Not the way it felt like it was always asking for something.
Not the way people looked at it like it was an invitation, even before I understood what I was inviting.
I remember standing in front of the mirror the first time I realized I had a shape. I must have been twelve, maybe younger. The curve of my chest didn’t feel like mine. It felt like something that had grown without permission, something that other people noticed before I did. My mother tried to ignore it until I asked her for a bra and the horror when she realized I fit into one of her own 34C. Not because I wanted it, but because I felt the need to hide.
But hiding didn’t work.
Because the body speaks.
It speaks even when we wish it wouldn’t.
No one taught me that your own body could betray you. That it could tingle and throb and ache in ways that weren’t about desire but about urgency. Or confusion. Or fire.
No one taught me that you could be aroused and miserable at the same time.
No one warned me that the world would see my body before they ever saw me. That teachers would whisper about deodorant instead of asking if I understood what was happening to me. That boys would reach for me in ways that made me left wanting, and I’d wonder if that wanting meant yes. That a cousin could climb into my bed and make me question whether something being “gentle” meant it wasn’t wrong.
That later, much later, I would learn there’s a name for all of it.
That name is:
Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder.
Even the name is clinical. Cold. Detached.
Like someone naming a hurricane “Breezy.”
PGAD isn’t about sex.
It’s about nerves misfiring.
It’s about being trapped in your own pelvis.
It’s about arousal that comes uninvited, that stays long past the point of tolerance, that turns you into a woman pacing the floor at night while your child sleeps in the next room, begging your body to calm down.
When the doctors didn’t believe me, I started believing I was crazy.
When the therapists called it “hypersexuality,” I tried to repent.
When I turned to masturbation or porn for relief, I thought I was the problem.
I didn’t understand yet that I wasn’t seeking sex.
I was chasing silence.
Here’s what no one tells you:
When a woman can’t escape the feelings in her own body, she will try anything.
She will beg. Bargain.
She will read the Bible and pray until her knees bruise.
She will get on her knees for other reasons, too.
She will try to “be good,”
or she will try to outrun the shame by being “too much.”
Sometimes both, on the same day.
I’ve lived in both extremes.
I’ve been the girl in the unwed mother’s home.
I’ve been the woman pretending to enjoy sex with a man who called himself my savior but turned my body into a product.
I’ve been the mother hiding her arousal while holding her baby.
I’ve been the wife who never told her husband how often she was haunted at night.
I’ve been every version of “too much” that the world warns women not to be.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking for help.
Because the help hurt worse.
The diagnosis became a punchline.
The symptoms became evidence that I was broken, or worse, I was dangerous.
Friends sexualized it.
Partners misunderstood it.
Doctors dismissed it.
And me?
I carried it.
I carried it through motherhood, through abuse, through addiction, through faith, through therapy, through rage, through recovery.
Through it all, my body kept speaking.
Even when I tried to silence it with opiates.
Even when I tried to numb it with porn.
Even when I punished it with food.
Even when I ignored it and hoped it would give up.
It didn’t.
It never did.
Because the body always speaks.
Now, decades later, I’m still listening.
I no longer see PGAD as a curse.
I see it as a flare, one my body sent up when no one else was listening.
It’s the signal I was taught to ignore, until I realized it was the only honest thing in the room.
It wasn’t about wanting sex.
It was about wanting peace.
It was about needing to be heard.
So now I write.
I write about the fire.
About the moments it nearly consumed me and the ways I clawed back.
I write because someone out there is still in that dark room, pacing, aching, not knowing what it means.
I write because I wish someone had done that for me.
I’m not a doctor. I’m not a guru.
I’m a woman who lived.
Who’s still here.
Who finally stopped apologizing for the way her body screams.
I don’t have all the answers.
But I have truth.
And I believe it’s worth sharing.
Still Rising, Rose
RoseCalder.substack.com