RememberingMySelf
- Mar 6
- 3 min read
By DK Hillard
For a long time, I didn’t realize I was living outside my own life. I was present, responsible, perceptive. I could sense what others needed and meet it with ease. From the outside, it looked like engagement. From the inside, it felt like hovering — as though my life was happening adjacent to me rather than through me.
What I didn’t understand then was that this distance wasn’t accidental. It was adaptive. It was how I learned to survive, belong, and remain connected in a world that didn’t feel safe to inhabit fully. Leaving myself became a skill.
Remembering did not arrive as memory. It wasn’t a recalling of events or stories from the past. It was a slow, and often uncomfortable return to my body — into sensation, rhythm, breath, and truth. I began to see that what I had been searching for all along was not insight, but inhabitation.
The body remembers what the mind cannot hold.
It remembers through illness and longing, exhaustion and desire, through the quiet insistence of what refuses to disappear. The body is not simply a vessel moving through time, but an archive — holding what has been lived, endured, and what has yet to be fully claimed.
Lineage lives there too.
Not just as story, but as pattern. As silence. As unfinished movement waiting for another body to receive it. Much of what I was carrying did not begin with me, but it lived in me. Remembering meant listening deeply enough to feel where the past was still shaping the present, and gently separating what was inherited from what was truly mine.
This kind of remembering is not tidy. It doesn’t move in straight lines. It arrives through thresholds we would not choose — loss, illness, moments when the old ways of being no longer function. These moments are not interruptions to life. They are invitations to re-enter it more honestly.
Remembering MySelf — A Journey Through the Threads of Time arose from within this lived process.
Not as a conventional memoir, but as a witnessing of how a life reassembles when the body is finally allowed to speak. The language of the work formed through listening — to memory, to sensation, to what emerged when I stopped trying to hold myself together. Story and image move together, tracing how a life reveals its meaning from the inside out.
As this remembering has deepened, I can feel it shaping the way I am beginning to re-enter the world.
I don’t yet have a fixed plan, and that feels important. What I do know is that the same listening that gave rise to this work continues to move through my life — through painting, through cloth, through the quiet relational spaces I’ve long held with others. However it takes form, what I am here for remains the same: creating spaces where people can reconnect with their own truth and gently re-inhabit themselves.
I no longer experience remembering as something I am doing. It is happening through me — a quiet unfolding that continues to shape how I listen, create, and remain.
This is the ground from which everything has grown. Not as answers or teachings. But as an invitation to re-inhabit the life that is already asking to be lived.
Remembering MySelf — A Journey Through the Threads of Time is a full-color hardcover volume — a woven literary work of story, image, and spiritual lineage. Created as a companion for reflection and remembering, it is something to live with and return to over time.
For those who recognize this terrain in themselves, you can receive this work on my website.
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