When I got sick I fell into an existential crisis. After years of chronic illness and infertility I felt like my body had betrayed me yet again. Every day of pain was a failure of my body. Every month without a pregnancy, another failure. I was already on the worst of terms with my body, so when I got even sicker, too sick to leave bed, too sick to parent, too sick to function, I didn’t know how to keep going. What was the point? When a body was so worthless, why keep fighting for life?
To find the answer I started with a question I thought could be foundational: What is a body for?
I am far from the first to feel like my body has betrayed me by getting sick or being disabled. I hear it all the time in my chronic illness groups, I hear it in my infertility support groups, I see it in movies. That word – Betrayal – it’s always that word. As if we had an agreement with our bodies and they are going back on it by showing signs of mortality. As if we are entitled to unerring health as part of the human experience.
If bodies were made to never age or get injured, then maybe aging or being injured would be a betrayal. But that’s never been the deal. Bodies are sacks of meat and fluids. We’re like water balloons with computers on top. Computers that come equipped with a planned obsolescence. It’s amazing we function at all.
I came up in church so I was taught a lot of ideas about what a body is for that have to do with how the spirit is affected by the experience. A lot of those ideas I don’t believe anymore, but many I still do. If the body exists for shaping the human spirit, clearly, perfect function and performance is not a part of that job description. So it’s not a betrayal when the body fails.
A viewpoint that expects perfect physical function from a body winds up in fascism real fast. Is the point of the body fertility? Welcome to The Handmaid’s Tale. Is the point of the body ability? Welp, we’ve wandered into eugenics.
A body is certainly not made to function without illness or disability. That’s not the deal. And yet we live with that expectation so powerfully we feel personally betrayed by signs of limitation or mortality. Why?
Because people make money that way. People make money when we are so terrified of signs of mortality we pour our dollars into wellness, beauty, and diet products. People make money off our labor when we work harder and longer to prove our worth.
This viewpoint doesn’t serve us. When bodies behaving as bodies do is viewed as a betrayal, it creates self hate for every failing, and terror over every sign of mortality. Fear of death and existential disgust lead to bigotry and self neglect. Poorer health outcomes are the result of avoiding medical care out of fear, ignoring self care habits, and developing a catastrophic world view.
If a body is made to work, my body is made wrong. If it’s made to fit a beauty standard, my body is made wrong. If it’s made to produce more humans, my body is made wrong. If it’s made to perform feats of strength, my body is made wrong. And not just me, but all of us? We’re all made wrong? I reject that.
I needed a new metric to evaluate because every external metric I was finding was leaving me on the valueless side of the equation. So I went internal. Let’s leave the outside world and all its valuations aside for a moment and examine the body function by function.
What are the functions of the body and what do they support?
My eyes see, my lungs breathe, my stomach digests, my bones and muscles move, my heart and veins circulate blood through my body. As I listed the functions of all my biological systems, one thing became very clear. Very few systems impact anyone but me.
My sense organs exist for me alone to experience the world. It’s true what your stoner friend suggested in college – we don’t see the same colors or smell the same smells. Our sensory experiences are unique to us, just to give us input on how to appreciate and navigate this world. Everything you experience with your senses is just your body’s gift to you.
My digestive system, my respiratory system, my circulatory system, my nervous system, those all exist for my survival. They don’t impact another soul, they are only for me.
When I take it apart job by job and evaluate the whole system it looks like this:
The body’s job is to grow, survive, and die.
Anything beyond that is conditional. Some of us do other things, some of us don’t. They only thing we are guaranteed with a body is that we will grow until we are done, then we will survive, until the day we don’t.
The body’s job isn’t to keep us from pain or injury, the body’s job is to survive. By drawing our attention through pain to what needs assistance. Through limiting certain functions in order to preserve others. Through delighting us and entertaining us through how our senses interpret the world. The body is your mother earth and your only true ride or die.
When I look at all the systems of the body together, it’s kind of astonishing we care so much about so little of what we’re capable of. It’s like we all have shiny new iphones and we’re so obsessed with the sleek design we never learn what else it can do.
We are so much more than our appearance and performance. We are a whole experience.