My body has always been my enemy. It’s a clumsy operation, too bulky to be delicate and graceful and prettily girlish, too round to be lithe and strong and boyish. It’s ill-proportioned, unwieldy, slow to move, slower to develop, inclined toward ache, illness, embarrassing appetite, inconvenient injury, unloved, undesired, unlucky. It lacks poise and rhythm. It cannot glide on any surface. It cannot catch or throw a ball. It would not and will not cartwheel. Was I the only person in the first grade who could not cartwheel? Maybe. Probably. I hated my body for its failure to perform at sport, at dance, at even walking, confidently, in flat shoes on a flat stable service and come tumbling down leaving a mess of scars and bruises, now ravaged by spider veins, moles, ingrown hairs, stretchmarks and cellulite. I used to tell myself the scars were cool, evidence of experience, signifier that I was the kind of girl, who didn’t give a shit, who would not fuss when one more part of me got ruined. But who am I kidding? I was always irregular, imperfect, as-is. My body always made me feel like a monster.
What’s the other word for when your insides cannot match your outside. Dysmorphia. Dysphoria. Dystopia. The me that existed, exists, in my mind was not the one that stumbled down the stairs and stuttered through her social life and stood, stolid, slumpy, frumpy in every reflective surface. When I was in college, I got drunk one night and told a boy that I sometimes felt like a brain in a jar in a broken old cabinet of skin and bones. He told me that was the saddest thing he’d ever heard. He also told me he could understand how I felt that way. I couldn’t tell if I should feel offended or vindicated, but I made a pass at him (didn’t fly).
I wasn’t self-destructive. I just couldn’t see how my body and I had the same interests. We were incompatible roommates. I wanted adventure. She wanted stability. When I left a mess, she would retaliate with an abscessed tooth at a party, or a knee injury the day before a 15 mile race. I would rail in fury as she aged, fattened, and flailed, ruined good days, worsened bad days. She would hack and cough and sputter along, scolding, faithless, and intolerant. I would fall back into bitter compliance and feel myself diminished. But she was the leaseholder. I knew that. I was always just the tenant.
Reckonings come with age. Aging bodies feel like a reckoning. Of late, my body is a total drag. Some days I try not to look at her in the mirror at all. She’s at me constantly, though. Tiny aches and pains that blossom into chronic illness, long-term conditions, indifferent to analgesics, intensified by anxiety, by emotion, by anger, inured to any distraction. It was only a matter of time until we ended up at emergency room a couple hours before Mardi Gras, day before Lent, and I’m getting intimate pictures of my interiors thinking, this not the first time I’m going to have a CT scan on a ruined Valentine’s Day. And there’s the doctor’s note. And there’s the shadow. And there’s the stupid, smug, mewling body, vindicated, see? I told you there was something wrong.
In the grand scheme of things, what’s going on with me is not a big deal. I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m not being cagey or mysterious. I don’t want anyone to overreact. Maybe I don’t want anyone else to tell me that I’m overreacting. These things happen as you get older. Some of it’s genetics. Some it’s ordinary wear and tear. Some of it is from things I’ve done to my body, and things my body has done to me. The casualties of our lifelong cold war are no longer just emotional or cosmetic. And as I lack the technology or pathology to literally separate self from self, it would seem that things must change if my bulbous, buzzkill, bitch of a body and I want to wring out a few more decades.
To be clear, I don’t want to make any changes. I don’t want to be the sort of person who uses healthy without a healthy dose of sarcasm. I don’t want to talk about fiber or vitamins. I don’t want to think about lifestyle as medicine. Everybody knows diet is a word invented by bullies to demean people and then scam them out of their money. I mean, there may be no hundred-year-old hedonists bound for heaven, but everyone knows the cool people long since took the express bus to hell. And like the philosopher said, I want to be where the people are. Ideally with a gin and tonic. And, if we’re talking dreaming here, let’s throw in a cigarette or two as well.
Do I sound ungrateful? Do I sound like a brat? Do I sound like an entitled child? Don’t I know that people have it so, so much worse? Have I even considered the horrorshow firestorm of the world in 2024? Are you fed up with me yet? Because you should be. Because I’m a coward. Because I’m a baby. Because merely living and living more than comfortably is not enough for me. Because I may have to adjust my weekend menu, I’m having an existential crisis so intense that I furiously threw half a banana across the room at the the shame of having to think about “healthier” kitchen substitutions when cooking for a dinner party. How mortifying!
I really hate Valentine’s Day, ps.
I do not, however, hate the body. I have hated the body. But I can’t. I can’t hate the body. Not now. Not anymore. Not just because she’s the only place I have to go, but because I am the body. She is me. Even though it’s extremely hard not to think of my arms, my hands, the bruises on my legs, the surgicial scars on my abdomen, the cranky aches and inexplicable pains as some undermining other.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to adore celebrate my body the way the self-helpers tell me I should. But a body doesn’t have to perfectly lovable to be taken care of. I’d like for this anxiety, this sadness, this weird pain in my side, this fury at the most gross and human parts of me to dissipate, so I can live, and live without such constant brutal meanness about myself when I would never dream of thinking such things about anyone else.
After my grandmother died a few years back, I found a framed picture of me at about four years old in some box of Nana’s things headed for the junk dealer. I’m practicing ballet in my childhood bedroom. I was probably already mad at the body when the photo was taken. I don’t remember that. And I did the cheesy, chintzy self-help thing and set it on my dresser with a Post-It note on the frame that says Don’t be so mean to her as a reminder.
I’m objectively cute in that picture. All four year olds are cute. I’m a tiny child, with no idea what the fuck is barreling down the pike toward me. It’s easy to be nice to that much innocence. It’s a different exercise when it’s my reflection now. The wrinkles. The fat rolls. The yellow teeth. The gray hair. The stretchmarks. The whole nasty business of the body and its myriad disappointments now and all time, all it has never done, all it will never do. It’s a lot harder to be tender with that. It’s a lot harder not to resent what I have to do to keep that body safe and sustained and alive. But what kind of monster would I be if I didn’t even try?
Tiny Commotions 