The vehicle in which I live
The vehicle in which I live
On spending one's life wearing a car-suit
Hello, friends!
(Bit of a content warning for this one; I talk a bit about bodies and shame. If that's a sensitive subject for you, feel free to skip this issue!)
Lately, I'm pleased to report that my reading habits have started to swing away from Superman comics, and back toward books. (Not to critique my Superman reading period, not at all; those comics offered some very much needed respite for a few months.)
I'm juggling several books at the moment:
- The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, by Sonya Renee Taylor
- The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans
- Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, by Jason Schreier
- Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
And there are still a couple of comics/graphic novels in the mix:
- Factory Summers, by Guy Delisle
- The Vision, by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, etc.
In one of her recent newsletters, Jami Attenberg talked about Island, a novel by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. Attenberg wrote this:
There’s a line (in) her book where the narrator’s grandmother says to her, “No island is an island.” And it had stuck in my head, me living on this island of writing as I do, so I wrote to Siri and asked her to explain what she meant by it.
Jacobsen's reply:
“An island is a very human idea; it reflects a very human feeling of disconnectedness. But nature is not a mirror. Underneath what we can see, all bodies of land are connected as parts of a whole. If you were to ask an island if it felt isolated or adrift, it would find the question silly. It would find the whole concept absurd. To an island there’d be no such thing as an island. Feeling disconnected comes easy to humans, I think. Our brains are wired to define ourselves through what we’re not: to recognize differences and imagine divides, to say I am this because I’m not that.”
To an island there’d be no such thing as an island. I immediately ordered the book.
The most powerful idea I found in that exchange was that a thing which seems isolated might actually be deeply, fundamentally connected to something else. While it may not seem to fit in, it's exactly the opposite.
I'm very nearly finished with The Body is Not an Apology. "Enjoying" is not exactly the right word for it, but that isn't to say that the book isn't meaningful. To the contrary, this book has articulated things I have felt—but for which I have never had words—for as long as I can remember. Taylor writes about re-learning a child's capability to love their body and what it can do, and about tearing down systemic body terrorism in our communities, and body shame in ourselves:
Not only have we avoided intimately knowing our bodies; we have forgotten that our bodies like doing stuff—walking, dancing, running, having sex! Body shame has severed our love of activity. In the chronicles of body shame, movement became a thing we avoided lest we jiggle while in motion! Unapologetic action is our departure from those old stories, prompting us to reconnect to the joys of movement. Many of us cannot recall a time when moving our bodies was something other than a way to punish them for failing to meet society’s fictitious ideals. But just as we were once babies who loved our bodies, we were also babies who loved moving them. We can invite ourselves back to this place. There was magic there.
Pure magic in this sentiment. For reasons which I legitimately do not understand, for most of my adult life the image I have of my "self" has not resembled the person I see in mirrors. When I see my own body, I feel disconnected from it. I am critical of it, disappointed in it; and because I am detached from it, those criticisms do not feel directed at me.
Bringing those two images together—the me I imagine I am, and the me I actually am—seems like important and difficult work. Taylor's book has so generously offered suggestions for how that work can begin, not just for my own benefit but in the way I view others' bodies as well. I really do think I'll be coming back to this one a few times. There's some real work I must do here.
Feeling disconnected comes easy to humans, Jacobsen wrote. I couldn't agree more. When I consider my life to date, there are so many examples. The same way I feel about this body, I have felt about communities: Where I live, where I study, where I attended church, where I practice writing, where I work.
When in 2012 Felicia and I moved to Oregon, I took a job as a creative director at Portland design firm. They'd hired me to lead creative for a streaming media client; because I'd designed some early streaming UIs for Netflix, it seemed like a good fit. But from the beginning it went sideways. Before my first day, the firm parted ways with the streaming client; as a result, I spent the next year bouncing between random projects that needed a hand, but not necessarily my hand. On my first day at the firm, a new colleague welcomed me, then warned me that it would "take ten years, no more, no less" to actually fit in. (I assumed they meant in Oregon; in retrospect, I think they meant at the firm.)
We'd settled in Beaverton, just a few miles from Portland. Beaverton's where Nike makes its home; Intel has a large presence there, too. The town is bursting at its seams. The street on which we lived was narrow, and packed tight with people and cars. For hours on end, a neighbor tinkered with his roaring motorcycle; seventy-five yards away, traffic whizzed ceaselessly past on a major artery. We woke in the middle of the night to the ear-splitting crow of a rooster who didn't care if the sun was up. Very quickly, I felt homesick for the seaside California town we'd left behind, for the sprawling openness in every direction, for the long drives beside the ocean, the Jeep's top pulled down, salt air in our faces.
That first job unraveled after a year. I didn't enjoy my time there; it wound up doing a real number on my confidence, in fact. I sought help from a therapist, and started to learn how to process experiences like that one. When, years later, another company I worked for was acquired, and my job was eliminated in a similarly toxic way, I knew how to manage my feelings about it; it wasn't a crushing blow that time around.
Five years back, we left Beaverton and its belligerent roosters, and settled in a house on a hill just outside a smaller town, a little farther from Portland. This is the first home Felicia or I have owned; we were happy to have a place to raise our daughter, to give her some stability. But then the pandemic began. The COVID season has been a troubling one, for many reasons. We've taken precautions, staying isolated and masking up and getting vaccinated, but we've also come to realize that many people in our community feel quite differently. That isn't unique to our town; it's happening all over the country. But that doesn't make it feel any less dislocating.
Next year we'll have been in Oregon for a decade. Do we fit in? I don't feel any closer to that concept than when we first arrived. But Jacobsen's right: It can be very easy to feel disconnected. We all have examples in our histories, in our presents. When I was young, for instance, our family moved several times
- When I was two years old, we left Texas for Alaska
- At seven or eight, we returned to Texas
- At twelve or thirteen, we moved to a different town in Texas
- At fifteen, we moved to Alaska again
Each move removed us from our various communities, and dropped us into brand new ones, where we usually had to start over again. The second time we moved was the first time it was actually hard for me; I can still remember my mother comforting me when I cried after school. All my third-grade classmates had been together since kindergarten; there were no Jason-sized holes in their group. With time, that changed, and I made good friends among them.
When eighth grade ended, we moved again. I started high school among strangers. For the first time, I didn't work at fitting in. It was clear from the beginning that I didn't, that I wouldn't. I spent most of my two years there eating lunch alone in the library, working my way through Louis L'Amour's back catalog.
It was a relief when we returned to Alaska in time for my junior year. Many of the same kids who had been my friends a decade before were still there. On the first day of school, a teacher called my name when taking attendance. Across the room, my childhood best friend snapped to attention, startled and happy to see me. We talked a bit after class, but our grand reunion more or less sputtered there. The long time apart was fatal; I'd missed out on too many years of common experiences.
2021 marks 25 years since I graduated high school, and I haven't attended a single reunion. I'm reasonably sure no one from either of my high schools would remember me.
Somewhere along the way, 'not fitting in' stopped feeling like an affliction, and just became part of my programming: I left the church community I was raised in. I struggle to find community with other writers; I'm genuinely terrible at this, both socially and professionally. I joined a few writers groups and organizations seven years ago, after Eleanor, and have since let all my memberships lapse. The only group I belong to now is a pencil collectors' community...but 'community' is a generous word for an organization whose members I don't know, and which sends me quarterly newsletters that were printed in someone's garage. I am adept at extricating myself from social obligations and events I don't wish to participate in, which is more or less all of them.
I've spent a lifetime building these patterns. Unlike me, my father still corresponds with coworkers from forty years ago, still chats with grown-up versions of fourth-grade classmates. Conversely, I don't keep many friendships warm; those I do succeed because they don't demand much of me. They can easily go months or years without attention, then pick up as if no time has passed, before parting again for a year.
Back to bodies: Sonya Renee Taylor created a workbook to go with The Body is Not an Apology. In the first few pages, it thoroughly disabuses me of a central tenet I've clung to:
Some of us, before this whole conversation about radical self-love, didn't so much hate our bodies as we engaged them as if they were vehicles, like a car we drove around. We only paid as much attention as was necessary to get the car started and get on with our day.
This model was not sustainable. There are some key differences between a car and your body, the primary one being that should you wake up and find that your car won't start, you will either buy a new car or find a new mode of transportation. Should you find that your body won't start, we can safely assume you didn't wake up. To treat our bodies like cars is to essentially treat ourselves like something disposable.
The idea that I'm just a passenger in my body is one I've held, without really challenging or considering, for years and years. (It makes me think of the Coen brothers' first movie, Blood Simple, in which M. Emmet Walsh plays a lumbering hit man who drives a too-small car; when Walsh is in the car, it seems more as if he's wearing a car-suit.) It even made an appearance in one of my early novels: A character died, yet his consciousness was preserved digitally. In the novel, I present this as rising above the constraints of a physical body, because that's how it felt—and still feels—to me. I've always wanted to live forever, and a body felt like the limiting factor here. Perhaps that's not surprising; in the church where I was raised, there was much talk of "shedding Earthly bodies" to achieve some greater reward.
This morning, I began a fresh journal, and started the exercises in the workbook. I don't know where this work will lead, only that it feels important to begin; it seems little wonder that I have trouble developing and maintaining relationships with the world around me when I struggle to do the smallest version of that with myself first.
I am fortunate: I have a home and a family where I am able to be at ease, where I feel accepted and understood and loved for who I am, no matter what seems to be happening inside me.
I keep a file with ideas for this newsletter, but sometimes I sit down to write one of them, and discover that my subconscious has been circling an idea for awhile, and it's ready to write about that instead. This issue is a perfect example. I thought I'd spent the last several months reading Superman comics because I needed a vacation from heavier reads. (That isn't to say Superman doesn't engage with serious themes; we all know that isn't true. But come on—he also sometimes has a flying dog for a sidekick.) What might also be true is that spending several months reading stories about a man whose entire existence contends with "fitting in" has dragged some of my own similar feelings to the surface.
Fortunate, then, that I have a place like this to explore those feelings, with such kind readers as yourself. Thanks for that.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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