Body as too much
or: body as enough
Prologue: body as too much
In a classroom somewhere I learn about the separation of the body and the soul and exhale a breath I’ve been holding my entire life because I don’t have to exist in relation to my body.
In place of fitting with my body, of allowing it to take up space and exist and be mine, I have spent years colliding with it. I was a fat kid, and have been oscillating between fat and mid-sized and somewhere in the middle my entire life, but what never changes is this sense of collision.
For weeks now, I’ve been gaining weight steadily, and after many years of doing my best to ignore my body, I’ve had to face it, probe it, listen to it, and this is the result.
ONE: body as wounding memories
At an age where I only retain certain, particularly wounding memories: in a dressing room, shopping with my mother, was the first time I remember not being able to look at myself. I was eleven, or thirteen, or younger, with a necessary affinity for pendulum tops and leggings, and though there is a good chance I had felt it before, it’s the first time I remember feeling such a carnivorous hatred for something that was working in those minutes to keep me alive.
Growing up in the early 2000s was witnessing the proliferation of the internet and with it, from the dying ashes of heroin chic, a vast expanse of ripe, unrestricted, body-related content. There were no voices, at this time, speaking out about the sort of mental damage it might do to young girls to have this shoved down their throats in a much more severe way than billboards in small-town malls and magazine covers. There were no body positivity influencers being shown to me, a fat teenager with unfettered access to the internet, brimming with angst with nowhere to put it.
Another particularly wounding memory, from not too long ago: I’m getting dressed for dinner and I have to stretch out my pants and one of the buttons pops off. This, of course, causes me to break down in tears and curl up on the bathroom floor while everyone tells me we're leaving soon! but I can’t get off the floor and I can’t just put on another pair of pants because the pants aren’t the issue, it’s me, of course, what else could it possibly be? The pants sit in a discarded, sad looking lump in the corner and I am another discarded, sad looking lump in the other corner.
My body has been expanding for weeks now, and I have been trying not to treat it as a betrayal, though often it feels like one.
A piece I wrote:
I am made up of all the wrong parts
not a body but a collection, a crude amalgamation, an exhibition of too much
I have always fallen out of the lines
staggering across memories, limping towards salvation
at the end of the tunnel I will be undone
remade in the image of something that is meant to be.
remade in the image of something that fits together, that is just enough.
something that heals, that does not stay tender like a fresh bruise
but takes care of its wounds.
I have always been a girl in a dressing room
filled with so much hatred that it felt like need.
I have always been a woman in the dark
filled with so much disgust that it felt like desire.
TWO: body as hollow
I have harboured some deeply unhealthy eating patterns in my life. I do better these days, and while I don’t know if I would classify it as an eating disorder per say, I did adopt some unhealthy conceptions around food, weight, and bodies when I was a teenager.
There’s a scene in Eileen where she takes a bite of something, chews, savours, then spits it out. I thought oh, that’s sad, recognizing the behaviour, but I never used to think it was sad when I did it — it was smart, clever, but never sad.
It takes distance to see things clearly. When I chewed and didn’t swallow, that act didn’t exist in a vacuum; the kind of loathing I must have felt to not even allow myself the satisfaction of finishing eating, of allowing something unhealthy to enter my body in anything more than a temporary way — that kind of loathing is boundless, uncontainable, capable of leaving behind marks.
I’ve never been thin and I’ve never fit into certain standards without moulding myself to them; my hips have always been too wide, but not in a good way, not in the way they’re supposed to be; I could never fit the right fingers around my wrist in middle school; my stomach is a mess of extra skin and scars from the appendectomy I had two years ago — when they take your appendix out they pump you full of air, bloating you for a while after, did you know that? Between that and the pain of healing from a surgery, can you guess which I was more miserable about?
THREE: body as heirloom
I learned some of this from my mother — these ways of hating, these patterns of being disgusted by my body— and while she would never have held them in her hands and given them to a child, she taught me indirectly what disdain looked like; girls model their mothers. My mother, like some mothers, never meant to teach me this, but as a child I internalized her disdain for her own body; oh, this is how I’m meant to feel. She tried, and that is what matters, I suppose, that she tried to shield me from it, in one way or another.
My mother likely learned this from her mother, who likely learned it from her mother before her. The contempt I feel for my body is a hand me down, an ancestral thing, cradled and nurtured and given from mother to daughter like a family heirloom.
It’s both comforting and disparaging to think of it this way; how many generations of women have come before me, using the same things, the same tools that were put into our hands as children, to enact our hatred? How many generations of women have left it behind?
FOUR: body as other
My body doesn’t belong to only me. I’m in high school, I want to say fifteen or sixteen the first time I learn this; downtown, at a crosswalk, being groped by a man whose face I can’t remember, but I do remember the way he smiled at me before he walked away. I sobbed in the bathroom of a mall but I knew it was a mercy I didn’t learn this in much more ruinous ways. I know many women who have, many women who learned that their bodies are not theirs in devastating ways, and much too young, you'd say, and I’d say, but when are you old enough to learn this? That your body does not belong to you? What is the appropriate age?
FIVE: body as harm
I’ve been trying to write about self harm in a way that makes sense, in a way that accurately depicts the specific hatred that twists inside you and comes out in ways that you recognize later as casually cruel, both to yourself and to those around you. I’ve been trying to articulate the inherent hopelessness of the act, but refrain from romanticizing it the same way I had to back then so I didn’t have to face what it was. It’s not an easy task, but I’ll offer this as an anecdote:
At a new years eve party, I’m sitting on the bathroom floor with someone I’ll fall out with in a few years, but that doesn’t mean anything then. We’re both drunk and sad the way teenagers get at parties. We’re supposed to be friends, but we’ve never really been friends. She’s showing me the side of her torso, all marked with swollen, angry red lines. Under my tastefully short skirt, what I’ve done earlier that day sits, and I tell her this. The sight of it on her doesn’t make me recoil, or flinch, or break down in tears; seeing it on another body doesn’t evoke much of a reaction from me. Instead, I think of how brilliant of a placement that is. I think of how I will replace the smooth skin on the side of my torso with matching red marks. This excites me. I feel sick about it.
She says nobody will ever love me like this—I am not paraphrasing here— and I say well, nobody will ever love either of us like this. I think, where does that leave us? On the bathroom floor, still, marked with our manifestations of hatred and all its consequences.
I would have given anything to look like her. I’d seen the various magnets on her fridge, boasting phrases that could have been pulled right from eating disorder tumblr pages back in the day, put there by her mother. I feel a specific kinship with her because in that moment we are united in this desire to be someone else. Yet I’m distinctly aware that she doesn’t wish she could look like me. A few days later she makes an offhand comment about a body that looks like mine, and I understand a fundamental truth about what divides us, and it’s not our mothers, or the placements of our harm, but our bodies, and the respective space they take up.
I don’t want to make self harm sound anything other than what it is: hopeless. It was a desperate act. I needed to ascribe meaning to it, because if it was devoid of significance then it was just sad. I needed it to be something more, something that marked me as something scarred, something hurt, someone that felt something. But it’s a desperate act. It’s a miserable thing.
These days, sometimes I get curious, and I get clumsy on purpose. This isn’t the same, except it is. I don’t know what to say other than it’s hard to let go of. I know vaguely that it’s been a few years since I’ve hurt myself, but I ignore slips ups because they are not done by trembling hands, curled around something sharp like it’s the only answer, they are not done with tears or hatred, but by disinterested, curious hands, and forgotten about hours later. This makes me a liar. I know this.
SIX: body as standstill
Writing about my body has wrenched me from whatever kind of peace I had made with it and back into this disgust that seems to be cyclical but with nothing to guide it. This peace was hinged upon tolerating my body at worst and ignoring it at best, but that is not peace — and it’s not love.
I’m ashamed because I’ve been here before. I know this place of disgust. And I know nothing that has to do with healing is linear, but it feels like a relentless standstill. I don’t know what to do with any of this. I stand before myself and I hold this scathing, sharp hatred in my hands and all I can say is: make it stop, please? But of course, I am talking to myself and neither of us know what to do with this.
It feels, in a way, like an insult to my intelligence (I am the one doing the insulting). My critical thought crumbles in the face of need to look different. I know I am more than that and yet in those moments I revert back to a singular, uncomplicated need. I should be able to take all that I’ve experienced, read, all that I’ve engaged with and the work I’ve done and be better than those moments, but I am, ultimately, not. At least, not yet.
When I have a negative thought about my body these days it feels like an abject failure. How dare I? It’s disheartening. I always seem to be clawing at something that is out of my reach.
I keep coming back to this line from Eliza Mclamb’s essay:
“Listening to “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” by Jeff Buckley and sobbing to the line “it’s never over,” not in a breakup way, but in the way that I have never spent a day of my waking life without wanting to be smaller than I am right now.”
I shrink the same way I taught myself how to at fourteen. I fold myself into heaps on the bathroom floor the same way I did at eleven. I hold myself the same way in the shower I did at eighteen. I look at my reflection with the same disparagement I did at twelve, fifteen, nineteen. It’s never over.
SEVEN: body as want
I have always hated being fragile. I don't want to be breakable, always ready to come apart. It makes me feel like something that’s been put together without care, so much so that it will crumble the minute it’s touched. One misstep and I feel everything I’ve grudgingly wrenched out of myself settling in again and there is nothing as singularly miserable.
I want to let myself exist. I want to allow my body to be. I want to stop hacking pieces off of myself to fit into fleeting and ever changing borders that have never and will never bring me any peace— and I know this, I know this, I promise I know. I want to stop feeling as if my worth as a person rests entirely on my body, as if it has any bearing on who I know myself to be. I want to stop thinking about my body as separate from me, as a thing that can have violence enacted upon it and retain no memory, no scars. I want to stop. I want it to stop. I am so tired of this hate. I am tired of this back and forth, this fossilized cruelty, this need to un-exist. I am tired of being too much.
Epilogue: body as enough
This is an old story, ragged and worn. But I didn’t want this to be just a sad meditation on bodies and hatred. I wanted it to be more of an offering: here is something that has haunted me for my entire life, and here is why healing will likely never look the way you think it will. In the case of my body, healing looks like beginning again and again. It looks like a heaping mess, but it’s still healing, or it’s trying to heal, and sometimes that’s enough.
I wish there existed a piece to be written that would tell you precisely what to do, how to heal, but I certainly can’t write it, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t exist.
Building a long lasting, strong relation to your body that is built on respect and care and love is likely not going to look or feel or be the way you think it is, the way you (and I) have been told it should. It’s not that it’s entirely impossible, but that it’s not linear and not particularly simple.
From this wonderful piece by Clio:
“Throughout history, it is bodies like mine that were clutched at with hope, carried around for the luck of fertility they bring. It is bodies like mine that inspired the great paintings of Rubens that dominate the halls of museums and stately homes. It is bodies like mine that were sculpted by the Greeks to represent Goddesses of beauty and strength.”
Another piece I wrote:
Myself, split in two: I am in the trees and my body is on the park bench and there is nothing wrong with it but I don’t know this yet and so when I am on the park bench my body is in the trees.
In one or two or too many of these times it was a leaving behind of my body: you stay here, I need to forget this for now, I can’t bear to bring you along with me, you’ll ruin everything.
I had forgotten that I am nothing without it; I am nothing without what makes me, I am nothing without the skin that turned red from the sun that summer and stitched itself together after I fell on the pavement; I am nothing without the hands that held playing cards and weaved strings together and held my little sister through a thunderstorm; I am nothing without the bones that held me up and the muscles that brought me above the water; I am nothing without a vessel for these words, I am nothing without something to hold myself.
And if I am more than nothing without a body, it is not enough.
Thank you for reading. This has been a long time in the making, and perhaps the most vulnerable piece I’ve ever shared. I hope it brings someone some solace.
A note: body as […] is loosely based on how In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is structured.
That’s all for now. Take care of yourself, please.
I could say something like, "I feel seen." And I do. Or I could say, "your words are magic elixir.," also true. But I need to say something bigger.
I grew up as a girl, and so much of this feels familiar and real and like my own memories of myself. Like so many of us were given this same, secret script and then told not to tell anyone else, and here you are confessing, and THAT part feels seen. But it's more than that.
I feel seen by your words as a transgender human. As a man who's body will never fit any norms, as a father who birthed his children and sees the stretch marks from it in the mirror, as a person who has wanted out of this life and nearly made it happen, your words found me.
So... Thanks for that.
Thank you for your vulnerability. This piece meant so much to me. My body has been so many different shapes and sizes in my life, and I feel deep ambivalence about it. It’s crushing and so hard to talk about with both honesty and empathy. I, too, don’t really know what it looks like to heal, to live in an embodied way, but this piece made me feel hopeful about continuing to try.