The Body as a Warning

The body always knows before the mind admits it. Long before the thoughts begin to fray, long before the brilliance turns brittle, long before the light fractures into something sharp, my body starts sending signals — quiet, precise, insistent. Not alarms. Not emergencies. Warnings.

The upward weather is a chemical event, and the body feels chemistry long before the mind interprets it.

The first warning is the heartbeat.

Not racing — vibrating.

A subtle tremor beneath the sternum, as if my pulse has become a tuning fork.

It’s not fear.

It’s frequency.

My heart sits higher in my chest, beating with a kind of alertness that feels like readiness but is really strain. It’s the body trying to keep pace with a mind that has already outrun it.

Then comes the breath.

Shorter.

Quicker.

More mechanical than organic.

My lungs behave like they’re optimizing for efficiency, not comfort. Each inhale feels like a task. Each exhale feels like a release valve. Breathing becomes something I do at the world instead of something I do with it.

My muscles tighten in ways that don’t look like tension from the outside. It’s not clenching. It’s bracing. A subtle readiness in the shoulders, a coiling in the calves, a buzzing in the fingertips. My body prepares for movement even when I’m standing still.

This is the body trying to anchor me.

This is the body trying to say: slow down.

This is the body trying to hold the line.

But the upward weather doesn’t negotiate.

My appetite disappears next. Not from anxiety — from irrelevance. Food becomes an interruption, a distraction from the velocity. Hunger feels like a background noise I can mute at will. My body asks for fuel and my mind answers with momentum.

Then there’s the heat.

The warmth behind the eyes.

The flush in the cheeks.

The subtle rise in internal temperature.

It’s not fever.

It’s combustion.

The body is burning through resources faster than it can replenish them. The chemistry is accelerating. The weather is intensifying. And the body, loyal and exhausted, tries to keep up.

My senses sharpen to the point of discomfort. Light becomes too bright. Sound becomes too layered. Touch becomes too immediate. Even the air feels textured, as if it has weight and direction.

This is the body saying: this is too much.

But the mind, lit from within, interprets the overload as urgency. As importance. As brilliance. As necessity.

The body whispers.

The mind shouts.

And in that imbalance, the warnings get lost.

My hands move constantly — tapping, adjusting, reaching, straightening. Not fidgeting. Discharging. The excess energy has to go somewhere, and my hands become the conduit. My gestures sharpen. My movements quicken. My presence becomes kinetic.

This is the body trying to bleed off the storm.

Even my posture changes. I stand too straight. I sit too rigid. My spine feels electric, as if it’s conducting something. My neck tightens. My jaw locks. My shoulders hover slightly higher than they should.

This is the body holding tension it didn’t choose.

And then there’s the fatigue — the one I don’t feel until much later. The quiet depletion happening underneath the brightness. The slow drain of resources. The cost accumulating in the background like a debt I won’t notice until the sky collapses.

The body keeps score even when the mind refuses to.

This chapter of the upward weather is not about collapse. It’s about the body’s attempt to negotiate with a storm it didn’t summon. It’s about the quiet intelligence of muscles and nerves and breath. It’s about the way the body tries to anchor me even as the mind insists on rising.

The body is not the enemy.

The body is the barometer.

The body is the warning system.

And every time, without fail, it tells the truth first.