How to Triumph Like a Girl
by ADA LIMÓN
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
I found this poem after one of my last abdominal surgeries. I’ve had so many at this point that I can’t remember which one. Maybe the infection? Or the hernia? Or the abdominal mesh? No. It was the hysterectomy. Of course.
In one of those recovery periods I decided to finally follow through on a life long goal of taking private voice lessons. I had found a wonderful teacher I trusted and I hoped that maybe learning to sing would help me rehab my abdominal muscles. At my first lesson she played the piano while I sang and then asked, “So! How did that feel?” I had no. idea. what she was talking about. What was I supposed to feel?
Like a lot of artists over time – athletes, actors, dancers, etc. – I relied on metaphor to learn to use my body as an instrument. If you’ve ever been around theater kids you may have heard some of this talk. Instead of a teacher asking ‘how are you feeling?’ you’re more likely to hear ‘how is your instrument today?’ This strategy creates a remove from the body in order to evaluate your craft without internalizing the shame of needing to improve. If I sing like garbage one day, I don’t have to panic that I am a garbage singer, I can just acknowledge that my instrument is having an off day.
But I get real snarky and eye-rolley at earnestness, so there was just no way I was going to refer to my body as an instrument. I liked the idea of metaphor, but it needed to feel true to me.
That’s when I found that Limon poem. Struggling to hoist my diaphragm up with wounded muscles, I got this mental image of the horse heart taking the place where my diseased uterus used to be. Pounding away with power I was building through my recovery.
The horse metaphor turned out to be really applicable to me in all kinds of other instructive ways. I have a big powerful voice I struggle to control, so we’d talk about pulling back the reins. I started thinking of vocal dynamics in terms of trots and canters. I had a rough onset where I’d blow all my air out getting started, so we’d talk about getting a good start out of the gate.
Along the way, I realized I was talking to myself a lot nicer when I was pretending my body was a pet horse. Most of us would never treat someone else the way we treat ourselves, and thinking of my body as something that wasn’t ME made me a lot nicer to my body.
I realized this technique was going to stay with me far beyond any singing ambitions, and it was time to give my horse a name. I wanted to think of something that felt wrong to use in anger. Something sweet or funny or loving so I couldn’t just fall into the same bad habits of negative self talk without realizing the absurdity of it. I closed my eyes and thought, “OK body, what should I call you?” and the name that floated up from my subconscious was Beloved.
I didn’t think I had any strong associations with that name at the time, I just thought, ‘well, that’s loving, I guess’ and decided to go with it, never thinking I’d be sharing it with anyone. Eventually I realized where that name came from. Sufi poetry for the loving part, Toni Morrison for the complicated bit.
I’ve learned that naming your body is an exercise a lot of different approaches to body healing do. Different recovery treatments and body shame treatments have actually practiced and come up with an academic approach to the same result I fell into with singing. Looking at your body from a remove creates a distance from the shame. But, here I go being snarky and eye-rolley again, because when I read up on those approaches I realized they were missing something I really really needed.
Space for the complicated bits.
Just treating my body like another person wasn’t going to fix things alone. Because my body hurts me all the time and I’m on record as not nice to people who hurt me. So treating my body as a person who hurt me was not going to solve anything. I needed a relationship that had room for all the negative feelings, the resentment, the anger and sorrow, the resignation, and could still get me somewhere positive. Something that didn’t require me gaslighting myself into positivity.
You know what that description started to remind me of? Caregiving.
Transcendent love one minute, the next you are counting to ten before you throw them out the window. One minute I am so full of ecstatic joy I can’t imagine a life without him, and the next I’m feeling powerless and terrified and wondering how I’m ever going to do right by him. Sometimes I’m resentful and sometimes I’m ready to kill anyone who crosses him. All the big feelings all mixed up together, often absolutely unable to be untangled from each other.
Anyone who has ever taken care of an elder, an animal, or a child, knows that sometimes they absolutely send you around the bend, but you keep showing up and taking care of them because they need you and you are loyal to them. So maybe sometimes when the kid throws the food off the highchair for the third time that day you would like to get angry and give up, but in that moment you dig deep and you think about why you’re doing this. You think about how that little person is depending on you for what they can’t do for themselves, you take a deep breath, and you go heat up more food. Because you don’t need to feel loving every moment in order to show up, you just need to show up.
My body is a horse named Beloved. Maybe your body is a sassy elder aunt who lives in Palm Springs. Maybe your body is a dog that gets distracted easily. Maybe it’s a garden that grows wild and it’s all you can do to tend its borders. Maybe it’s a wise old wizard or a teeny fussy baby. You might know instantly, you might have to ask, you might have to try some on. All of that is just fine and part of the process.
Not only do I treat my “pet horse” way better than I ever treated myself, it is so much easier to stand up for her too. Setting boundaries and carving out time to meet your own needs is really challenging. It was so easy for me to just forget it and make everyone else’s lives more convenient. But now whenever I need to set a boundary with someone who would benefit from my self neglect I can just say, “Sorry, I’ve gotta go home and take care of my horse.”