February 22, 2024

My Body, Myself

It’s so hard to be a person. I used to feel like an alien trying to approximate human speech when I communicated with people, as though the words in my head transformed on their way to my mouth and came out sounding not remotely the way I intended them to. I blamed myself for this failure to make myself understood, spent hours dissecting it in therapy and desperately asking myself and my therapist why I was so fundamentally lacking. What was the missing thing in me that would make me whole, make me real, make me a person other people would love? Because to me, being understood, communicating on a shared wavelength, was what being loved meant. It still is, a little bit.

Once I began a poem fragment with the line, “What is a body but a collection of traumas?” I never finished it, and now I’m glad because while I vividly remember the feeling I was attempting to channel, I wouldn’t like to have that particular record of it to look back on now. I believed that my body was an inconvenience both to me and to anyone else who had to interact with it, that it was something to be tolerated, a burden to bear. The concept of loving my body was not only foreign to me, but actively repulsive. What was there to love? I didn’t even want to coexist with my physical self. That C.S. Lewis quote about not being a body, but being a soul who had a body resonated with me so deeply because it offered me a way to think of my body as a separate entity, not an integral part of who and how I was in the world.

Something I repeated often during this period of my life was that if I were someone else, I wouldn’t be friends with me.

When my doctor tried to impress upon me the seriousness of my physical health issues, I felt a vague, disembodied dread that I couldn’t tap into in any useful way, and I always found myself thinking, wow, that’s terrible for whoever she’s talking about, a person who is certainly not me.

I could go on, could list many more examples of ways in which I removed myself from myself, ways I found to estrange myself from my body, ways I punished myself for the sin of being human. But that’s not what this is about, or at least it’s not the part of the story I currently occupy and the deep sadness I feel for that version of myself is not something I want to roll around in right now.

The point is that lately I’ve been trying to connect with myself as a physical being, to learn my terrain and map my way to bodylove. I think I’m currently at body neutrality, and that feels like the place where I’m going to make my home for a good long while, and I’ve had to accept that it’s okay. It’s okay if I can’t take part in body positivity for myself right now, and it’s okay if I can’t love my physical self the way I’ve come to love my mental and emotional selves, and it’s okay if I rest in the space of just not hating myself. And here is why.

Because it’s so hard to be a person, and one of the ways I’ve found to cope with it is to care for my body. Not to love it, perhaps, but to view it as a small, scared, needy creature, to ask what it needs, what would make it feel safe and soothed and tended to, and to do those things. There is no shame or judgment when I’m asking these questions and carrying out the subsequent tasks, only kindness. Only gentleness. Only understanding, because there’s never enough understanding to make me feel seen, so I’m learning to give it to myself. I feel emotionally disregulated and I put on my favorite Moroccan rose body butter. I feel anxious or stressed and I massage nail strengthener into my nails and cuticles, even though it has yet to have a noticeable effect. I want to cry from exhaustion and I take a long hot shower, which is something I used to hate and dread and has now become a treat I give to myself. I feel hungry and I ask myself if it’s genuine hunger or if it’s boredom, or loneliness, or sadness, and if it is genuine hunger, I feed myself things I like and feel good about eating, which doesn’t have to mean healthy but does have to mean that I won’t feel worse for having eaten them. I feel angry or frustrated and I move my body about it, channel it into the tension release of my feet hitting the ground and my breath coming faster and my heart rate increasing.

It’s not a perfect system. It’s not the solution to all my problems and it hasn’t led me to a place where I love my body. But what it gives me is peace about living in a body, living with a body. What it gives me is the feeling that my body and I are on the same team, working toward the same ultimate goal. What it gives me is a sense of being rooted in my body, of no longer hovering outside of it waiting to be let in or sent away. I feel calmer, more grounded when I treat my body as something worthy of care, something worthy of tenderness and soft touch, something that isn’t a shameful burden to hide and avoid, but rather something alive in the world that deserves good things.

It’s so hard to be a person, and I don’t need to be a force working against myself to make it even harder. I sit in the sun on a perfect day, feel it shining on my face, feel my soul exhaling in relief, I put on a dress that makes me feel like a version of myself I only get to be on my best days, I run a brush through my hair until it falls soft and heavy on my shoulders, I stretch in the morning before I get out of bed. I do all these things and I think, this is being alive. This is physicality without strings. This is why I was made. This is what I deserve.

This is what I deserve.