bodies, bodies, bodies: not the movie
on chronic illness and the unbearable, constant, beautiful weight of living presently
if you have a good therapist, you’re going to resent the hell out of them at one point or another. they point out the parts of you that need work and say pick up a pick ax you mentally ill bitch. god bless them. i love my therapist, but i resent her deeply for making me into the best version of myself thus far. i could list hundreds of the violent reckonings she’s put me through because i pay her to do so.
but there’s one that festers beyond all others.
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i’ve only existed in my body for two years.
before this, i had a body. i floated above it and watched it work, dance, cry, hurt, laugh, and live day in and day out. allegedly, this is not the same as being in your body. i existed as a sort of spectral puppeteer moving my hands and legs from one day to one decade to two until suddenly i was an adult who played at knowing what it was to be alive.
i can’t remember the exact session it happened or what we were talking about but i can remember the insistent tug of my body. the click of me and my body fitting into place.
it wasn’t a nice reunion.
it wasn’t particularly revolutionary. i was outside and then i was inside. i’ve been stuck ever since.
i hate this bitch body sometimes.
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bodies are odd. they look different. they do different things. they’re a collection of traits that determine how you are treated and what class of person you are.
melanin is defined as a substance in your body that produces hair, eye, and skin pigmentation. if you have a lot of it that’s not good in places where they don’t like too much of this pigment.
testosterone is defined as a steroid hormone that stimulates the development of male secondary sexual characteristics, produced mainly in the testes, but also the ovaries and adrenal cortex. if you have a lot of it in your body, that could be a good thing, or maybe not.
similarly, fat as a noun is defined as a natural oily or greasy substance occurring in animal bodies, especially when deposited as a layer under the skin or around certain organs but when it becomes an adjective it is of a person or animal having a large amount of excess flesh.
bodies contain things and those things are either too much or not enough and , for some, fit just right in a narrow, neat square of the BMI index or a paper bag or bottled and picked up at the pharmacy.
we’re somehow a neat list of scientific-sounding things that sometimes are good and sometimes are bad while also being messy, disgusting but kind of impressive conglomerations of bone, blood, bile, and other things that don’t begin with the letter b. we’re a never-ending mass of excess flesh, steroid hormones, ovaries, oil, grease, and genitalia.
the physicality of these things, the parts of you that can touch or be touched, is as much your body as that sudden jolt of panic to your nervous system at the thought of your ex.
your body is you is your panic is your pain is just us sitting here reading this with that little voice in your head we can’t hear in the way you normally do. the body is a lot of things but most of it you can’t touch.
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doctors deal in the business of bodies. what hurts? what works? what’s pregnant? what’s aching? what’s broken? what’s bleeding? what’s oozing?
if you go to the doctor and tell them "something is wrong with my body", you better have all the right reasons to back it up as well as the aforementioned correct amount of fat, testosterone, melanin, etc. to be taken at face value.
good luck if you don’t.
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if you exist outside your body for long enough, it turns out you have no idea what a body is supposed to feel like. it has recently come to my attention that they aren’t supposed to always hurt. pain isn’t necessarily an indicator that you’re alive. not just the emotional such as discomfort at the tenseness between you and a friend or all that space between you and your father.
it’s that physical aching pain in your joints or that new lower back pain from sitting all day at a job that pains you in a different way. the strain in your eyes that no blue light-blocking glasses can touch. it’s all just pain or aches or soreness or hurt or throbbing.
the moment i snapped into my body i was somehow all too aware of all the things that hurt.
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5 things you can see. 4 things you can touch. if you’re mentally ill, which i suspect most people who read this newsletter are, you know where this is going.
grounding exercises are meant to bring you into yourself. when you start to leave your body you grip a piece of ice, breathe a certain way, or just acknowledge you’re floating away. there are a lot of ways to stop your body separating from you.
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chronic illness also has a definition.
chronic illness: conditions that last 1 year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both.
this definition is particularly important as it determines if you are chronically ill.
now, here’s the kicker. depending on your body, the weight, the color, the size, the beauty…your word on this may never be enough.
chronic illness is very simple when you hurt. it can be boiled down to the fact that your body is not working more often than it is. no blood panel, urine sample, or whatever other bodily fluids they can take from you to determine your health will say it as simple as it is.
i hurt.
you can’t touch the feeling of hurt. you can’t see hurt. you can, however, see skin, bodies, shapes…
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bodies are weird. it hasn’t been all awful being in mine. i can pick up my cat and hold my friends. my hands hurt sometimes but never when braiding one of my best friend’s hair.
maybe the pain knows what it can’t have.
maybe it knows i’m in my body now.
Waited a while to read this when I had the space to hear your voice and feel you writing it. Glad I did. (Also, I love you.)