I wish I could say that I was one of those people who had some joyous reunification with their body based in love and enlightenment and sunshine and lots of plants.
But no. This lesson, like all my lessons, came the hard way. With blood and guts and tears and screaming. With resisting what was good for me until there was no other option.
My epiphany did not come in a yoga class or on the top of a mountain. It came in bed, writhing in pain, crying and cursing my broken body for giving me nothing but grief. I hated it for betraying me again, refusing to get well, refusing to respond to treatment but instead getting worse and worse.
More surgeries, more infections, more gruesome treatments that involved getting intimately acquainted with my own guts. Literally. I wore my inside goo hanging from my abdomen in little fluid collecting bulbs for months. I had to dig the pus out of my own surgical wounds and then pack them with sterile cloth.
Every time I thought I was healing enough to reenter the world, we’d find another problem. A new hernia, a new infection, another way my body was crumbling into dust underneath me.
And of course, through all this, I couldn’t really get my pain treated. It HURTS to be a pin cushion, it hurts to have a nervous system on constant high alert, but the war on drugs means that the medications I needed are rarely available even to take as appropriately prescribed.
So that meant that for months, as I was recovering from major surgery, I laid there in bed, in pain. Only taking the medication I couldn’t do without and trying to cut pills and nurse whatever medication I did have access to.
I was in constant pain, lonely and desperate, and grieving this worthless body I was chained to. This body that couldn’t bring me fulfillment through children, that was always in pain, that couldn’t hold down a job, that rendered me a burden and limited me in so many ways. I thought my self hatred was nothing but rational.
In that moment, in my twilight state of surgical recovery and pain and nearly constant meditation for trying to control the pain, I had this imagining. I saw myself in an orange prison jumpsuit, making a break for it. I was climbing up an embankment on the side of a road, a prison transport van rolled over on it’s side behind me as I tried to race to freedom before I was recaptured.
But I couldn’t get very far because I was chained to one of my fellow prisoners. They were stumbling up the hill, trying to keep up, trying to get my attention, as I yelled back at them a stream of criticism and abuse.
Finally, my prison buddy just sat right down on the ground, refusing to move another step. I looked at it in horror, knowing we were losing valuable time, but my prison buddy looked up at me unwavering and said, “I am not moving one more inch until you start showing me some god damn respect.”
I remember opening my eyes, startled out of the moment. My body is my prison buddy, chained to me through this mortal existence whether either of us like it or not. It’s like I saw my life from the perspective of my body, and in that scenario, my body wasn’t the asshole. I was.
I was wailing and gnashing about all the ways my body had failed me through trauma and disability and infertility and all the normal beauty standards, but I had not considered the ways I was failing my body.
There are the obvious ways – ways I ignored my health until the consequences were too great, damage I caused through neglect or suboptimal coping skills, my whole relationship with food – but also the smaller ways. Ways I had refused to listen to my intuition, ways I spoke about myself, ways I had betrayed myself, ways I blamed my body for harm it was actually desperately attempting to mitigate.
So much of the chronic pain I experience is a result of C-PTSD. My body responded to the gaslighting and trauma I experienced as a child by taking notes and compiling evidence and bearing the record. It kept that pain in front of me long enough to get me out. And then it did that again. And it did that again. Until eventually I worked my way out of every toxic system I was born into and created a life that nourishes me. My body is the loyal friend that refused to say things were fine. And I had been blaming it for bothering me.
That meditation haunted me and I knew I needed to change the way I was treating my body, but I had no idea how. The only thing that came to me was to just try to stop treating myself like such shit.
I immediately discovered I couldn’t just stop being a jerk, I needed to find something productive to replace it with. I needed to find a productive way to talk to my body, but it had to be right for me. I smell bullshit and I check out immediately. Affirmations tend to make me eye-rolly. My friend Paula says people who hate affirmations are people who hate lying and don’t like liars. Not all of us can go straight to love if it doesn’t feel true.
I read The Body Is Not An Apology and I still believe that Sonya Renee Taylor has all the right answers. The truth is in that book. I just couldn’t make it apply to me. If you have not known a lot of love and kindness in your life, you can’t always just grasp on to it because you want it. If you have known trauma or disability, sometimes you have a lot of wrestling to do before you can get to love.
Sometimes I’m still mad my body can’t do what I want it to do. I’m mad I have to cancel plans, I’m mad when I’m in pain, I’m mad when I have to face a limitation, and I have very very good reasons to not trust anyone who comes across as too good to be true, even when that someone is myself. Declarations of self love did not feel like solid ground I could build my life on then. They felt like tissue paper. I needed to start somewhere I could trust, that would give me room for all my negative feelings too.
Sonya Renee Taylor recommends becoming a caretaker to learn how to apply self love, and lucky for me I already am one. I’m a mom to a disabled kid with high support needs, and one thing motherhood has taught me is that there are a whole lot of negative feelings riding alongside all the transcendent love of parenting. Exasperation, anger, frustration, grief, they’re all there, and ignoring them will end in disaster for all involved. I’ve learned how to hold them right along side all the good, letting one enrich the other, knowing that love is built by establishing trust, which is built in showing up during the hard. So I thought about what it would be like if my son’s mom was my body’s mom, and the first thing I did, just like when I first met my son, was to give this child a name.
My body’s name is Beloved. I’ll tell that story another day, but I wanted something to call my body that differentiated it from ME. Something that I could not speak except with love. So many of us are taught in one way or another that everybody else gets to have needs, but our own are shameful. Our needs are selfish, while other people’s needs are understandable.
So since I was taught that *I* wasn’t allowed to have needs, I needed to imagine my body as someone else – someone that was allowed needs. Some kind of a caretaking relationship where I would understand that mundane care tasks are part of the job and that frustration didn’t mean failure. I think the best are a toddler, an animal, or a dearly loved elder. Someone where you will still show up and take care of them, even when they are making you crazy, because you have a fundamental love and loyalty to them.
Beloved is an obstinate horse. A giant meaty trail horse who will sometimes let you lead, but if she wants to go to the river, good luck stopping her, she’s going to the river.
Sometimes when I need to feed her, she refuses. And I have to say, “Come on Beloved. Eat your food.” It feels so stupid the first few times but you know what it DOESN’T feel like? Shame.
The war that used to wage in my head anytime there was food in front of me has become irrelevant. The voice screaming at me that I didn’t deserve nourishment and the voice screaming about how broken I was since food was so hard…those voices just don’t mean anything to me anymore.
They’re still around, I still live in society and still have to deal with all the systemic pressure to fit in, but now it’s just like they’re people making too much noise in public and it’s not hard to ignore them and go about my business feeding my horse. Those voices can say what they want about me, but they can’t convince me a horse doesn’t need to be fed.
I started making myself a morning routine, and unlike all the other times I crammed my schedule full of every aspirational habit at once, I just started by asking my horse Beloved what she wanted that morning. One task at a time, slowly building only when I felt I had mastered the task before, I started taking care of myself. Proper sleep. Dental care. Skin care. Regular breakfast. Lately she’s been wanting to move so I guess I need to find some exercise options. I treat my body in the same way you’d approach a spooked horse or a rescue dog, since, that’s basically the best way to describe my nervous system.
The goal was to go slow, steady, and just show up every day to take care.
Because that’s how you build trust. You cannot jump to self love if you are untrustworthy with yourself. Love can’t exist where trust can’t thrive, and I believe that’s true for ourselves too. If we can’t trust ourselves, we can’t love ourselves.
To create a friendship with another person, you have to build it. Through shared interests, vulnerability, and consistently showing up.
You have to build a relationship with your body in the same way. You show up, you treat yourself with care, you build the trust, and the trust builds love.