Somatic Field Report #6 — Season Finale. Filed from home, all departments accounted for.
by Jod(y)ie
I took one trip this June. I came home with two trip reports.
Mine reads like this: Trip of a lifetime. Milan, the Alps, a river full of castles. Air like a revelation. Fell in love with an entire country. Stood at ten thousand feet and felt something I don’t have clean words for. Would not change a single day.
The other report was filed by my body, and it is formatted differently. It is formatted as an incident log.
The Incident Log (Excerpts)
Day 2 — Dept. of Vestibular Affairs (Balance & Complaints): Horizon in motion. Repeat: HORIZON IN MOTION. Gyroscope operator requesting hazard pay. Passenger insists this is “part of the charm.” Logged under: it is not.
Day 4 — Load Signaling Dept. (Surface Division): Heat plus occlusive layer detected. Standard venting failed. Went to press. Full publication, page one, font size WELT. Readership: reluctant but confirmed.
Day 5 — Fluid Security Dept.: Memo received: AIR IS THIN. Initiated emergency stockpiling per protocol. All inventory relocated to Ankle District. Warehouse at capacity. Management remains confident this was the right call. Management is alone in this.
Day 8 — Gastrointestinal Workers Local 002: Notice of work stoppage. Grievances: novelty inputs, irregular hours, six time zones, unauthorized gelato quotas. Strike resolved upon return to familiar conditions. No further comment.
Day 12, post-trip — Small Fiber Postal Service: All primary routes jammed. Urgent memo rerouted via last open corridor (between toes, night shift, bicycle). Delivery eventually signed for. Notarized by dog.
Five departments. Five incident reports. Five completely different formats, symptoms, and filing systems.
I read them for weeks the way anyone would: as five separate problems. A skin problem, an ankle problem, a stomach problem, a balance problem, a toe mystery. An anthology of malfunction.
Then I got all the department heads in one room.
The All-Hands Meeting
FACILITATOR: Alright. Everyone’s reports are in. Load Signaling, what triggered your publication?
LOAD SIGNALING: Load. Heat load, chemical load. We publish load. It’s the name.
FACILITATOR: Fluid Security?
ALDOSTERONE: (defensive) We received a memo about conditions and responded to the load—
FACILITATOR: GI?
GI LOCAL 002: The load, obviously. Look at the grievance list. It’s just the word load with examples.
FACILITATOR: Vestibular?
VESTIBULAR: The horizon was moving, which, fine, technically the boat’s fault. But would we have filed a formal complaint in a well-rested year? We would not.
FACILITATOR: Postal?
SMALL FIBER COURIER: (small voice) The envelope literally said REDUCE LOAD. I read it. It was a short memo.
FACILITATOR: (long pause; slowly raises a laminated card) ONE AUTHOR. FIVE HANDWRITINGS.
EVERYONE: (murmuring, checking their reports against each other’s, going quiet one by one)
ALDOSTERONE: (finally, quietly) …We thought we were the whole story.
FACILITATOR: Every department always does.
The Part Where I Stop Kidding (For Real This Time — It’s the Finale)
Here is what took me a whole season to say plainly:
I did not have five conditions this summer. I had one system, carrying one load, describing it in five departments’ handwriting — welts here, warehouses there, work stoppages, moving horizons, midnight mail. Read separately, they looked like an anthology of things wrong with me. Read together, they were a single-author work with unusually varied penmanship, and the manuscript said one thing on every page: this was a lot. I am handling it. Here are my receipts.
And — this is the part I need you to hold at the same time — both trip reports are true.
It really was the trip of a lifetime. The same organism filing all that paperwork was also the one delivering the goods upstairs: the awe at altitude, the recognition, the falling in love with a place. The body that billed me for the load was the body that made the trip worth the bill. Same instrument. The complaints and the transcendence came out of one machine, running honestly, at capacity, in both directions at once.
We are taught to read bodies like anthologies — a specialist per chapter, a fix per symptom, a diagnosis per department. Nobody’s job is the whole author. So the author goes unread, filing report after report in every handwriting available, waiting for someone — anyone — to put the pages side by side.
Be the one who puts the pages side by side. Yours, your kids’, your dog’s. The departments are never the story. The load is the story. And the load, respected, handled, given somewhere to set itself down — resolves. Overnight sometimes. With a liquidation sale and a sunrise on the Rhine.
That’s the season. Every card on the wall says a version of it:
The plate is not a legal authority. Your manual is not my manual. The ankles are not a warehouse. The skin is not being dramatic. The courier is not the message.
One author. Five handwritings. Trust the organism.
Filed from home. All departments have returned to normal operations and are demanding recognition in the credits. The dog, having chaired the final meeting, has approved this report with the customary paw print and gone back to sleep. End of Season One. The organism has already renewed itself for future seasons without consulting me.
Continue the Field Reports
This is the finale of the original Somatic Field Reports — a six-part season narrated from inside a body that runs its own curriculum. If you landed here first, the whole anthology reads best from the beginning.
- Start here: My Gut Bacteria Are Better Somatic Practitioners — where the season opens.
- ← Previous: The Courier
- The whole incident log: The Benadryl Paradox, The Cankles Accord, and Unit: SKIN.
- What’s next: the Special Editions — a second season on why the author went unread in the first place.
Sources & lineage
The jokes are mine; the science underneath them is not. “One system, five handwritings” is not just a metaphor — it’s close to how integration actually works.
- Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge. — The clinical version of “one author, five handwritings”: how a single system comes to file its reports in separate hands, and how it learns to read them together.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. — On why the body files its own trip report, in its own format, whether or not anyone upstairs is reading it.
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton. Available via the Polyvagal Institute. — For how the same instrument that billed you for the load is the one that made the trip worth the bill.
The committee accepts public comment below. All submissions are reviewed by the dog.