Taking My Body Back

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

I am taking my body back
from systems that treat endurance as a virtue
and exhaustion as a personal flaw.

I gave years to work without limits,
to teaching, care, and constant availability,
to building futures while postponing my own.
I called this commitment.
My body called it extraction.

When my body withdrew consent,
It was information,
never weakness.
It was a boundary where dignity begins.

Burnout is structural evidence,
never individual failure.

I am taking my body back
from productivity as worth,
from unpaid labour dressed as passion,
from the idea that rest must be earned.

This is reclamation,
rather than withdrawal.

My body carries the record
that policies ignore.
It remembers what institutions forget.

Taking my body back
is a human rights practice.
The right to health.
The right to rest.
The right to work without erasure.

I move more slowly now.
I listen longer.
I stop when stopping is required.

This is alonetude.
This is consent.
This is a refusal.

My body is no longer extractable.

Image: When the Body Withdraws Consent

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. A single running shoe rests on volcanic sand, emptied of the body that once relied on it for endurance and escape. The shoe functions as an embodied artifact rather than a symbol, registering a moment of refusal. Its stillness marks the point at which movement ceased to be restorative and became extractive. In this inquiry, the object is treated as data within a Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology, documenting how prolonged institutional demands inscribe themselves onto the body and how withdrawal becomes a protective, rights-bearing response. The absence of motion here is evidence, never failure.

Shoe as Witness

I had no plan to photograph meaning. I noticed the shoe because it felt familiar.

It was worn, emptied, left behind without ceremony. No drama. No collapse staged for recognition. Just an object that had reached the end of what it could give. Standing there, I felt a quiet recognition settle in my body. This is what it looks like when consent is withdrawn.

There is vulnerability in admitting that stopping arrived beyond my choosing. For years, I believed endurance was a moral good. I learned to equate commitment with overextension, capacity with worth. That belief was reinforced daily by academic life, where staying available, absorbing uncertainty, and carrying invisible labour were treated as evidence of professionalism. When my body finally refused, I read it as failure. I had yet to understand that collapse can be a form of protection.

With some distance, perspective begins to shift. Burnout is never solitary in its emergence. It accumulates. It settles into muscle, breath, gait. What I once framed as personal weakness now appears as a predictable response to prolonged insecurity and unrelenting demand. The shoe holds this point without argument. It records stopping as fact, without apology.

The action, small as it seems, was noticing. Pausing long enough to see the shoe as more than debris. Photographing it. Allowing it to stand as data rather than decoration. This is how my research is unfolding now, through attention rather than acceleration. Objects speak when I stop trying to outrun them.

Scholarly engagement lives quietly inside this moment. Trauma-informed scholarship reminds us that the body remembers what environments require us to override. Labour research names how systems normalize depletion while individualizing its consequences. Human rights frameworks affirm the right to rest, to health, to work that requires no self-erasure. No summoning of those texts was needed while standing there. They were already present, carried in my body, waiting to be acknowledged.

This image belongs to the same counter-archive as the stones, the shadows, the painted surfaces, the early mornings by the water. Together, they document something institutions rarely record: the moment a body stops agreeing to conditions that diminish it. They track fatigue, refusal, and the slow work of recovery.

In this work, taking the body back is understood as a human rights practice.

I am no longer interested in proving resilience. I am interested in listening to what the body says when it is finally allowed to speak.

This shoe tells that story better than I ever could.