A week ago, I started a new part-time job.
Nothing glamorous. No lights and sirens. No trauma. No death. No emergencies. No rushing from one crisis to the next.
And after my first week there, I can honestly say something I never expected to say:
I love it.
But as much as I love it, I think my body, my emotions, and the healing version of me love it even more.
I laughed at work this week. Real laughter. The kind that isn’t rooted in sarcasm, dark humor, or emotional survival. I enjoyed talking to people. I enjoyed helping people. I enjoyed my coworkers. People help each other there. They smile. They joke. They ask questions. There is movement, conversation, and connection, but there isn’t chaos.
There’s no walking out of a room where someone died and immediately hearing people joke about lunch five minutes later because that’s how everyone copes.
There’s no emotional whiplash.
And for the first time in a very long time, my nervous system noticed the difference.
Recently, I’ve been seeing more social media posts and professional conversations claiming that “the body does not keep score.” I understand there are debates surrounding trauma theories and how trauma impacts the body and brain, but personally?
I beg to differ.
In fact, I would challenge some of those people and their science to come live inside my body for a few months.
Earlier this month, I visited my functional neurologist, and one of the biggest realizations I had was this:
It may not have been my brain itself causing so many of my neurological symptoms.
It was the feedback my body was constantly sending to my brain.
You see, my body has spent decades preparing for danger.
My shoulders naturally sit up and forward, almost like I’m bracing for impact without even realizing it. My muscles stay tight and guarded. My posture reflects survival. I am literally having to retrain muscles to rest in the positions they were originally designed for. I’m having to relearn how to bend, lift, move, and carry tension.
One of the hardest things I’m trying to change?
Learning how to stop sleeping in the fetal position.
That position developed because of trauma I endured while sleeping. My body learned long ago that curling inward meant protection. Safety. Survival.
People often think healing is all mindset work. Positive thinking. Therapy. Emotional awareness.
But healing is also physical.
It’s teaching a body that has lived on high alert for fifty-two years that it no longer has to prepare for danger every second of the day.
And honestly, I think that’s part of why this new job is affecting me so deeply.
For most of my life, I believed I was simply good under pressure.
As a paramedic, I spent over twenty-five years responding to emergencies, violence, trauma, death, abuse, and crisis. I was known as the “black cloud” because the bad calls always seemed to find me. Shootings. Cardiac arrests. Fatal wrecks. Fires. Abuse cases.
And the truth is… for a long time, I thrived in it.
The adrenaline.
The urgency.
The movement.
The unpredictability.
Looking back now, I think chaos felt normal because chaos raised me.
I used to think I loved EMS because I loved helping people. And I absolutely do love helping people. But I’m starting to realize that another part of me loved EMS because it mirrored the environment my nervous system had been conditioned to survive in since childhood.
Chaos felt familiar.
Hypervigilance felt normal.
Adrenaline felt like home.
And now I find myself grieving something difficult to admit:
I think if I had experienced a healthy childhood, I may have never wanted to become a first responder at all.
That realization has been hard to sit with.
Because I truly do love serving people. I love connecting with people. I love helping people during difficult moments in their lives.
But I no longer love what the environment itself is doing to my body.
For years, I thought I was healing while still remaining fully immersed in the very atmosphere that reinforced my trauma responses daily.
Now I’m beginning to wonder if being a paramedic has unintentionally kept parts of my nervous system trapped in survival mode.
I still work in EMS because financially, I have to. My benefits and income support responsibilities this new job simply cannot. The pay difference is significant.
But for the first time in a long time, I have a goal.
I want to slowly transition away from emergency medicine by the end of this year.
Not because I’m weak.
Not because I don’t care.
Not because I’ve lost compassion.
But because I think I finally understand that healing sometimes requires more than learning new thoughts.
Sometimes healing requires a completely different environment.
And maybe that’s the biggest lesson this new job has taught me this week:
Peace felt uncomfortable to me for years because chaos was all I knew.
But now?
My body is finally starting to respond to peace the same way it once responded to danger.
And I think that might be the clearest sign of healing yet.