Intimate Spaces
On finding safety in the spaces that frighten you most
Intimate spaces aren’t only found in romance. They live anywhere we are asked to be seen — in our work, our friendships, our creative lives, the way we move through the world. Anywhere we’ve been hurt before. Anywhere fear lives alongside the longing to belong.
There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes when someone safe triggers something that isn’t about them at all.
When your body responds to the present as though it is the past. When every nerve is firing a warning that your mind knows isn’t warranted — and yet.
This is what trauma does. It doesn’t wait for context. It doesn’t care that this person is not that person. It only knows what it learned to survive.
But that does not mean we need to remain in survival. We can build our capacity to move into a state of thriving — where the parts of us still in survival are cushioned by our own ever growing presence.
It comes slowly, and then all at once. In the quiet work of holding our boundaries, and ourselves, without self-abandoning. In learning to discern and name our felt sense. To soothe and support ourselves back to safety.
I wrote this poem in a season that followed the wreckage. One where I was tentatively returning to myself — and finding that intimacy, even the quiet kind, even the safe kind, could still send me back there in an instant.
But instead of armouring up, I acknowledged the truth. Letting the fear, rage, and sadness within me be witnessed as it spilled out. And in it I was met — genuinely held in the mess of it. That changed something in me.
Healing the wounds left by others doesn’t happen in isolation. Sometimes it happens in the very spaces that frighten you most. In the choice to open, even when everything in you is braced for impact.
This poem is about that moment. The war happening beneath the surface. And the whisper that cuts through it anyway.
What if.
Intimate Spaces
my body tightens
as his fingers graze my thigh
my distrust of men
ignited
a battle cry rips through me
beneath the surface
my past selves assemble
jostling for position
ready
to fight
to flee
to freeze
the closeness we share
illuminates
the scars that I bear
unseen
the promise of intimacy
looms
I’ve often felt
unsafe
boundaries crossed
made to feel
less than
my hackles rise
not as a reflection of him
but those who came
before
their lust
more important
my comfort
merely an afterthought
reinforcements built
around my heart
my body taught
in protection
and yet
a whisper to trust
breathes within
what if…
with that
I open
truth spills out
laced with fear
meeting me
in the mess
holding me
he assuages my fears
I slowly unravel
from shame
honouring my truth
I’m learning how
to find safety
in intimate spaces
This poem holds a moment where opening led to safety. But I haven’t always been able to find my way there. There have been times I thought I was following my own truth — and wasn’t. Times I confused the longing to feel safe with the felt sense of actually being safe. Where my mind, desperate for the story to be different, overrode what my body already knew.
The difference, I’ve come to understand, lives in trust. Not trust in the other person — but in yourself. In your capacity to hear what your body is actually telling you, beneath the noise of what you want it to say.
This is the layer underneath it all. Without it, we can do all the right things and still not quite find our way home to ourselves. And it takes time. I’m still learning it.
If you’re curious what that looks like for you — what safety actually feels like in your body, and how to begin trusting yourself to know the difference — I’d love to support you in finding it. It’s some of the most important work we can do.
If this resonates and you’re ready to begin building the capacity to come home to yourself, so that when the moment asks you to open, you actually can, The Archer is where that work happens. It’s a 6-month journey back to yourself, and it’s waiting for you here.