I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that saving my life depended on finding a way to stop hating my body.
I had just had yet another surgery to treat a chronic illness, but this time I couldn’t recover. Infection, then another hernia requiring another surgery, then another infection. I spent years in the kind of medical recovery where surviving is your full time job. For a person who spent her life up to that point going to dangerous lengths to make her body disappear, the amount of care required in healing seemed like an impossible joke.
My background is in community organizing and human rights movements. And so my mentors taught me that it is important to start with your social location so your listeners know who is talking at them.
My name is Tresa Edmunds. I’m a writer, artist, activist, and performer.I’m a queer white American woman who was raised Mormon and left it behind.I married my college boyfriend and we went through 16 total years of infertility treatments together, ending up as the parents of the joy of our lives, Atticus – a disabled autistic kid with high support needs.
I am disabled – neurodiverse and chronically ill and with a host of mental health diagnoses consistent with my chaotic upbringing.I am an abuse survivor and advocate and have spent many years working in recovery spaces and crisis intervention as a stakeholder and peer counselor, talking with people who need to talk about their own experiences with abuse.I am not a clinician, I am a patient. I am here in the trenches with you struggling to figure out how live. I have a dark sense of humor, a mouth like a trucker, and I am comfortable in the messy places because they feel like home.
The seeds of Body Loyalty were planted in a very dark place. In 2016 I had a mysterious health crash. I’ve had poor health my entire life and learned to manage daily symptoms as part of my lot, but this was new and it was scary. My health crashed so swiftly and the only treatments anyone could suggest were the same ones people always tossed at chronic health patients. Exercise. Eat right. Self care.
I couldn’t form a sentence anymore and I required 20 hours of sleep a day, but the best I was being offered was: try going for a walk.
I found my way to wonderful doctors. It took cashing in every ounce of privilege and knowledge of systems that I had, but I found them. I found a wonderful GP who took gentle care of my medical trauma and gave me the appropriate prescriptions with dignity and trust. I found surgeons who could correct long neglected issues. And I had a good five years of medical recovery where I was trapped in a bed alone with my thoughts and pain, to sit with myself and explore how I was going to take care of myself the way you’re supposed to. Exercising, eating right, developing healthy habits, I had a million failed efforts and no idea how to make lasting change.
It’s not that doctors are wrong when they tell people that exercise and diet will help. It’s just that advice hides the ugly truth of how inaccessible that level of care is for so many of us. For some reasons that are systemic, and other reasons that are the result of deeply internalized messaging.
In order to put in the amount of work it takes to take care of a human body, and to do it in systems that don’t want to acknowledge that humans have needs, you have to believe the person inside that body is worth fighting for that care. And many of us, deep down, do not believe we are worthy of that level of care.I certainly didn’t.
I am a seeker by nature and trauma therapy wouldn’t become available to me until late 2017, so I spent my life wandering through all manner of spiritual and recovery spaces, looking for answers.
Group therapy, anonymous adjacent recovery groups, feminist consciousness raising groups, abuse recovery, OCD management, trauma work, a stint in a mental hospital, eating disorder support groups, religious recovery groups, ALL the alternative healing spaces. I had a stocked toolkit of mental health resources. A shiny red Sears Craftsman toolkit. You name a therapeutic modality and I have tried it.As I was laid up in surgical recovery, somewhere in that haze of twilight sleep and pain and brain fog, some little voice inside me said, “This is up to you. You have to find a way to believe you are worth fighting for.” So I started opening drawers in that toolkit and got to work.
My experience having a body has been one of liminality. My disabilities are dynamic – the impact of the symptoms on me change by the day and aren’t always visible.I grew up in poverty and spent my youth as a teenage runaway, and now live with class privilege.I’m a bisexual woman married to a man.I have been a straight size woman with body dysmorphia and a small-fat woman with body dysmorphia.I’ve been infertile, and then nearly died in childbirth.I’ve been told to gain weight by doctors and told to lose weight by doctors.I’ve been told I was too fat for eating disorder treatment and too thin to get pregnant.I have seen a lot of sides of this human experience. It has been a confusing ride and I have **Struggled** to find peace with myself. My body is not capable of running marathons or birthing babies unmedicated or booking swimsuit modeling jobs, and is always causing me some kind of pain, so what is it even good for? Why should I justify all the TIME it takes to care for something that had so little value? For my own health I needed a way to value a body even as recalcitrant and pain-ridden and obstinate as mine.
And I needed to do it not only for my own survival, but because I had to have something to explain to my son. He was in his last years of childhood, before the teen years descend. I knew the battles that adolescence was going to bring to him, and I knew I needed an answer. How was I going to teach this boy that his body has value? A body that is contracted with painful muscle spasms, that doesn’t obey his instructions, that marks him as so different from his peers? What would I say to that boy about why he should love his body?
I realized that any positive body messaging that didn’t include the reality of disability was a theory that didn’t have room for me. I respect so much about Body Positivity and Body Neutrality and I support anyone who teaches them or practices them. But the material on the subjects that I was engaging with did not resonate to me. The popular discussions still felt so centered on appearance and ability, and I needed something that gave me permission to live, even if I could never meet those standards.
Body loyalty is my answer.
All that time in surgical recovery, I learned how to talk to my body and how to listen to the answer. And I learned how to feel gratitude and compassion for her contributions, and how to be more respectful of her in the future.
I realized that what I have with my body isn’t a judgment – positive, negative, neutral. It’s a relationship. I give to her, she gives to me, and we work it out together as we go through life. Sometimes we’re doing great, sometimes we’re mad at each other and talking past each other, but we’re stuck together as long as we’re alive, so we have to make it work. Like every show I’ve ever watched about mismatched work partners, you start with being loyal enough to each other to do the job. Then grudging respect grows. And then you’re family.
If I feed myself every day, I will get better results out of my body.If I get myself the rest I need, the movement I need, the medical care I need, especially when it’s inconvenient, I will get better health results.By just acknowledging the fact that I am a human with needs, and that is not a moral failing, I was able to find the resources to start implementing changes.I didn’t make these beliefs about myself up. They were fed to me by the systems I came up in. My family system, my religious system, my cultural system, they all worked together to teach me that my only value was in what could be exploited out of me. And I learned that lesson so well I followed through with my thoughts and choices. For so long I believed that anyone else’s needs were understandable but mine were something to be ashamed of. I was a burden. Digging this idea out of my head has required challenging a lot of systems that benefited from my self hate. But it was work worth doing because it led me to my freedom.
My journey just trying to survive this human experience has taught me that there is no thing on this whole green marble that will fix everyone. No diet system will help all people, no exercise is appropriate for everyone, even aspirin affects us all differently. It’s comforting to believe in certainty and one right way to do things, but it won’t fix your problems.The only way is to determine what will help YOU. And the only way to do that is to have your own back, prove to yourself that you deserve loving care, and find the way forward that is loyal to your own body’s needs.