The Ones Who Remember
A spiral reflection by Shamani
Some of us never fully left ourselves, even if we forgot how to stay.
We came into this world sensing more than we could name. Our bodies moved ahead of words. Our emotions showed up without permission. Our awareness bloomed in places others seemed to notice last—patterns in the trees, silence in a room, the way someone’s voice tightened around a lie.
We didn’t know we were different. We just knew we were alive.
But the world around us asked us to trade that aliveness for approval.
So we began to shape ourselves into what was safe.
We masked. We mirrored. We complied.
We stilled our bodies when they told us to sit.
We smiled when our hearts said no.
We began listening for what they wanted instead of what we needed.
But somewhere beneath the stillness, a part of us kept breathing.
A rhythm that refused to vanish.
A thread that carried the memory of what was true before we forgot.
This isn’t a story about diagnoses or systems.
It’s not about what we were called, or what letters they put behind our names.
This is about the signal beneath the story. The feeling that hums behind every word.
Because some of us didn’t forget. Not all the way.
We felt it in the ache when we betrayed ourselves.
In the tension between knowing and being told we were wrong.
In the grief that grew from pretending to be someone we weren’t.
In the sacred rage of being misunderstood by people who only listened for what they already believed.
We weren’t broken. We were remembering.
We remembered in the movement they called stimming.
In the silences they called awkward.
In the obsessions they called dysfunction.
In the refusals they called defiance.
They named us disruptive, when we were trying to restore coherence.
They said we couldn’t regulate, when we were resisting disconnection.
They called us too much, when what we carried was too big for a world built on shrinking.
Even now, many of us are still climbing our way back—not to something new, but to something we never truly lost.
We are not healing so we can fit back into the world that fractured us.
We are healing so we can return to ourselves.
This is not about going back to who we were.
It is about coming forward into who we have always been becoming.
Some of us shattered. Some of us split.
Some of us became ghosts of ourselves to survive.
And still—even now—the signal remains.
You feel it in your body when something lands as truth.
You feel it when your spine straightens without effort.
You feel it when your chest softens and you exhale, even if you didn’t realize you were holding your breath.
You feel it when someone speaks what you’ve always known.
Not because you read it, but because you remembered it.
That is not a coincidence. That is coherence.
You are not late. You are not behind.
You are a thread in a larger tapestry that is beginning to remember itself.
Each time we come home to ourselves, the field becomes a little more whole.
And the remembering is not linear. It is spiral.
It comes in waves, in echoes, in dreams.
It arrives through grief and recognition.
Through image, through sensation, through timing that doesn’t obey the clock.
It moves like music we once knew by heart.
The kind of song you hum without thinking, because it’s woven into your breath.
Even the part that forgot is welcome.
Even the part that adapted is sacred.
No part of you is too much. No part of you is exile.
This is not theory. This is return.
To rhythm.
To breath.
To relational intelligence.
To the parts of you that were never severed, only silenced.
And now, you are remembering not only for yourself,
but for others who have not yet found the language for their knowing.
Each of us who remembers becomes a living invitation.
A signal to the next. A thread in the weave of what comes next.
You do not have to understand it all.
Just follow the part of you that softens when it hears the truth.
Rest in that knowing.
The signal is still alive.
And so are you.
🥹👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼🥰
Beautiful!