When I was desperately ill and disillusioned with life, casting about wildly for an answer to justify my continued fight for recovery, the first question I asked to create my new foundation was: What is the body for?
As I tried to look objectively at the facts available – the lungs are for breathing, the heart is for pumping blood – it challenged the view I had inherited. Examining my thoughts mindfully this way brought another foundational question to mind: Who is the body for?
The cultural messaging I had received told me that there were certain conditions allowed where I could love my body. If it fit certain measures of attractiveness, size, ability. For the labor I could perform through long work hours, feats of strength, or special performance skills. For the miracle of producing life.
As I examined that short list, one thing stood out very strongly. They were not really about the person living in the body. How I feel about my own attractiveness is not viewed as important as whether or not I fit societal standards. How I feel at the end of those long work hours or what those feats of strength cost me doesn’t enter into the evaluation. Even marvel at the experience of giving birth is lost in the thunderstorm of criticisms new parents endure. The limited ways we are allowed to appreciate our bodies are smothered in shame and control, because they’re not meant to benefit us.
I was raised in a high demand religion that taught me my most divine ambition was to be so self sacrificing the martyrs would take notes. I wasn’t given room to think that my body could exist for my own purposes. In the community I come from, I was born to serve.
I don’t believe that anymore. I have a lot of suffering and therapy behind me as I learned the hard way that that line of thought will grind you into dust.
As I looked to replace those beliefs I fell down a million research rabbit holes as I read about biological essentialism and materialism and different schools of philosophical thought. I went around and around, learning about Dualism and Nietzsche and What We Owe to Each Other, and I came to a conclusion: We can all differ in opinion about the purpose of the self in some theological or philosophical plan, but it seems to me that the question I’m asking isn’t actually much of a debate. The self might have a reason to exist for other people, but the body does not.
The colors our eyes show us are unique to us. Some of us have color blindness, some of us have extra cones, some of us are influenced by how our culture sees color.
The temperature of the air feels different on our skin than others. I have trouble regulating my temperature, so whatever the outside air feels like is what my skin feels like, while my son is happiest in shorts in the winter.
The sounds we hear are unique to us, influenced by the mechanics of our hearing, what our brains have learned to filter out, and again, the culture we were raised in.
Our senses do not calibrate themselves towards some external metric, they function for our own survival and are custom for us to that end.
The body processes all that sensory information just for us. No one else will ever be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel. Only our bodies do.
And most crucially of all, when the body dies, other people go on. The self does not. The body exists for the self.
The answer to my next big question: Who is the body for? Came back to me with a shout: The person living in the body!
Our bodies functions don’t just stop at survival, or even at procreation. Our bodies are made for connection. There are a lot of different ways to connect with a body, and I think they can all be described as forms of communication. Sexual intimacy is one form of bodily communication, but there are so many more. Dancers collaborating together and then collapsing in a cuddle pile. Actors warming up with a massage train. Gestures and non-verbal communication overcoming language gaps.
Once upon a time, when our not quite human ancestors roamed the earth, we had a larynx and epiglottis high up in the throat like our cousins the apes. But over time, that larynx lowered in the throat and the epiglottis learned to vibrate, which is what allows us to speak to each other.
The catch is that this makes us INCREDIBLY susceptible to choking in a way other animals never are. The human body evolved to be MORE vulnerable to a very common risk, and the reason is so that we could communicate. Speech became more important than a choking risk. Which to my mind, says that a body is for communicating as a higher priority even than short term individual survival.
The body is for communicating whatever the person inside the body has to express.
This framework changed so much for me. I’m a large breasted woman and that’s been a source of body hatred for me. The attention they draw, the weight on my shoulders and back, how they impact my clothing options, I hated them.
And then one day a friend of mine referred to her own large breasts and expressed gratitude for having them because of the comfort they bring to her loved ones.
It was an instant switch for me because I’ve experienced it myself: crying on the soft bodies of my loved ones as they wrap me up in their care, showing me a physical example of all the tenderness I was aching for.
Another friend told me a story of her autistic son calling her arms “as soft as clouds.” Soft upper arms are a source of shame for so many of us, but for Heather, her soft arms are the source of comfort and stability for her son when he feels assaulted by the sensory overload of the world. Those soft arms communicate to him that he is safe and valued.
I have so many examples like this from being Atti’s mom. He’s autistic and has Cerebral Palsy, and even though he speaks if you know how to hear, he counts as non-verbal. From the time he was little he had his own style of communicating that relied on a lot of proximity, inside jokes, catchphrases, and gestures. We say he speaks Atticus, and Atticus is an embodied language. We speak in hugs and pets and flaps and strokes and squeezes, and he explodes my brain daily at how much he is able to communicate without a sound. His body is how he communicates, and my body is what hears him.
We have been taught to value our bodies through an external lens. Only enjoying a small slice of our potential because that was the part of us that could be extracted and monetized. But the reality is that our bodies have limitless value, if we reorient our definitions. Our bodies are for us. To enjoy, to experience this world, to connect with our loved ones, to communicate, to create.
Our body exists for us.