"My Body Kept the Score"
by Mason Rodrigue
They’ve all told me to read “The Body Keeps the Score” as if there’s an answer in there that I don’t live every day. I was rucking through Audubon Park, running intervals with this pack trying to make self-imposed time hacks, no regard for the stiffness in my back or my right leg and it’s secondary injuries exacerbated by the infantry, a bad ankle and hip coping for a bum knee. Even so, physical injury isn’t what keeping the score means- My nervous system has been storing trauma since long before the Marines. It’s fight or flight, overstimulation keeps me up all night. A history of risk taking behavior and self sabotage without caution, hyper vigilance leads to exhaustion. Crash and burn into a dorsal state, depressed, dark, grappling with fate- and hate. I am barely living, certainly not thriving. I am surviving. I begged my body to run faster. “Please, why can’t you just run like you did when we were 21?” My body asked me if I even knew what I was running from? My body told me I wasn’t slow because of the ruck on my back, but because of everything I still haven’t unpacked.
Mason Rodrigue is a former USMC machine gunner. Listen to his most recent interview on the Savage Wonder podcast here.
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If you give monkeys enough time, can they really write Hamlet? How did Leon Trotsky actually react to finding an axe embedded in his head? What does it take for two strangers to fall in love without screwing it up? Are you having a bad day or are you simply stuck in a "Philadelphia"? The VetRep 2022 season of staged readings kicks off with an evening of fast and funny staged readings featuring the whimsical comedy of David Ives.
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