#PrideOnThePage Day 21 (June 21): NEST
✨Let your nest be made of scraps and stars. Invite someone in.✨ What does safety look like when you create it from scratch? This prompt invites you to describe your sanctuary—imperfect, handmade, radiant. Who gets to enter? What do you keep there? What do you leave at the door?
Cartography of Almost: Fascia, Landscape, and the Unbuilt Nest
I have a big problem still with feeling safe, even in my own home, let alone in the country I live in, in the society I am part of. Much of this is internalised and stems from being ostracised, bullied, mobbed and labelled over and over again, from not belonging to any group I ever was part of in Germany, at least never in a way that I felt unconditionally held, supported and loved. Yes, I remember moments when I have been loved, even unconditionally—few fleeting moments—maybe some of them clouded by the throws of passion, by intimate togetherness until life again intruded and brought us back to reality.
I. ENTRY POINT: the place I didn’t flinch
Sri Lanka, one room, brass pot swinging.
forty-five minutes where the air didn’t betray me.
I did not scan for exits. I forgot to remember pain.
my breath stopped running from itself
→ it wasn’t love / it was absence of harm / close enough
(side margin note: even the memory feels slippery. did I really belong, even then?)I have felt what I express in German as "verraten und verkauft," the very deep mistrust towards a person we once trusted—a person you trusted unconditionally, unquestionably—and who turned against you as soon as it was convenient for them, or to bring forth their own agenda. And how used and exploited you feel afterwards—so dirty, and cast away, like a dirty rug that's no longer needed.
II. In the clinic hallway where hugs are rationed like gold
six-weekly vertebra check-in
her arms around my spine say:
yes, this exists.
yes, you. still you.
→ (margin: only hands that don't demand I return the gesture)
→ (margin: “held” means more when it doesn’t want anything back)
I have a true problem with describing what my safe haven, my nest, my one and only safe place looks like, because frankly I never had that place for longer than a fleeting moment. I had it lying in an Ayurvedic clinic in Sri Lanka on a massage table, getting a shirodhara. I had it in moments with my late partner. I have it when my coach and friend gives me the "one hug about every six to eight weeks" I receive when we meet. She is the only one consistently providing hugs in the past five years. Her office and the room of my Alexander technique coach I usually see once a week are the two single places in Germany where, for an hour, I am occasionally able to reach a felt inner safety that exceeds an 8 on a 0–10 scale. Never a 10 though.
III. FIELD DATA: fascia surveillance
Town = tension
Birthplace = betrayal
Train = shifting threat gradient
Moor = loose jaw, soft hip, breath with options
/forest says: "brace"/
/horizon says: "maybe"/
So yes—I have experienced how it feels when my body finally feels safe. For 45 minutes out of nearly 58 years.
IV. TEST: I tried again
affirmation. visualization. negotiation.
walked 200ft in hometown
back said: “we’ve done this before”
my spine carries more memory than my mindAnd the rest of the time? I was either completely dissociated, so dissociated that it not even registered that I did not feel safe, because I did not feel anything at all—had no self, no boundaries, no needs—or I was finally (in the past 4.5 months) becoming more and more aware of just how unsafe I feel in my body. And how very sensible and sensitive my body is in fact reacting to the changing surroundings.
V. Cautionary Vow
I will not leave gagged by shame
I will not leave in anyone’s pocket
I will not leave as the story you get to tell about me
→ (margin: "you’ve changed." yes. that’s the point.)Like when I am sitting in a train and it is between stations—how it shifts when it stops and people move and change places and settles again into a more restful rhythm. Or when I move through nature. How my body reacted when the landscape widens, when there is space—how approaching people affect a shift of tension in my fascia. Or when I walk through a forest.
VI. this is not nostalgia
this is inventory.
this is fascia locating what belief once dulled.
this is topography of tension overlaid with longing.
→ “home” is a sound I haven’t heard yet
→ not here. not yet. maybe never. still: I mark it.
(side margin, footnoted voice: not a healing place. never was. too dense, too tight, too close.)Many people experience forest as healing. For me it is rather the opposite. I have found—the more dense the forest, the more tension accumulates in my body, hindering my ability to move freely, because the fascia is tensing up more and more—and how it relaxes again when the forest opens up onto a field, a hill with a view, when we are perched on the cliff and can look out into the land. Or what it does when I walk through a town.
VII. unfinished legend of this map
☐ = places I almost stayed
⊗ = places I disappeared
◎ = places I exhaled
⁂ = the ones who stayed with me anyway
→ (margin: you, reading this, might be one of them)I have wondered why walking (not driving) around created back pain out of nowhere, when the same walking—let’s say, in a moor with vast views into the landscape—does not create any of it. I tested it. I was afraid of walking a longer stretch because of the developing back pain when I walk through towns, most especially my own birth town. Yet I can easily walk the moor—and yet not 200 ft in my birth, aka home town, without getting almost crippling back pain.
And no—in both cases no people are around.
And it is consistent. I tried it over and over, even with affirmation, visualisation, with assurances toward myself. It does not change a thing.
While exploring, I suddenly remembered all the times I was on holiday with another person outside of Germany—my parents, school, a friend, my partner—and each and every time they commented, uni sono:
"You've changed. We don't even recognize you anymore. You behave completely differently than you do at home."
(footnote, folding into the center: the nest is not a place. it’s the short-term safety of being unnamed.)And that’s when it trickled in.I have a problem with safety when I am in Germany.
Yes, I can lower it by being alone in vast open landscapes—yet I live unfortunately in a landscape with many small hills, no vast view, no far horizons. Most of those hills are topped by forests. It is pretty, yes—imagine rolling Toscana hills topped with mixed northern forests and small towns and villages.
(endnote, near blank space: I will leave like one who chooses their horizon.)And it is not my landscape at all.
Neither are big towns. I have always felt best in places—hotels, B&Bs—where my view dipped below the endless horizon, like in vast plains, mountain tops, ocean fronts.
soft voice again:
places that never once called me back.
just let me be.VIII. return to the unbuilt nest
Maybe the nest is not built, yet it is gathered.
It is the accumulation of places where my body said yes,
of people who didn’t make me prove my worth.
It’s not one room—it’s a constellation of exits I chose.
Not sanctuary by design. Just—absence of threat, felt fully.
(side note: maybe that’s enough to start with. maybe that’s what building looks like.)INVITATION: shared anatomy
Where do you find your moments of "absence of harm," even fleetingly?
What textures remind your body it exists, and that this, too, matters?
What does your unbuilt nest look like, feel like—
not the fantasy of safety, but its actual pulse?
→ (margin: this map never closes. mark yours too.)
Thank you for helping me finding my nest.
Very special shoutout to
for being the Creative Lookout’s first paying subscriber. I am over the moon for this. Thank you so much!And dear #PrideOnThePage creators, by now I am so in awe by your diverse, wonderful. layered stories this Creative Challenge has brought forward, it frankly is blowing my mind away:
