Hi, loves. 🌿
On the body as living thing
There are still weeks when I end up in the car, crying to my sister. How does this still happen? Is there a time limit on crying to your sister in the car?
It’s been a tricky month for my body — S.I. pain turned into upper back spasms, it is all truly so terribly dull to recount. Acupuncture helped for a time, then something would cease up again, and I’d be back on ice, back on her table. Do I have an explanation? No, other than the fact that the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, etc., and that I am a middle-aged mother trying to keep a lot of balls in the air, and that the stresses of the world do make their ways under our skin and get lodged in ways that are hard to unravel.
So I sought out a new bodyworker: maybe, I reasoned, I needed something more, something more forceful? More…permanent? Someone who actually, I don’t know, shifted bones around a bit? This is all, I must say, a question of instinct. It isn’t scientific. After so much time in this game, one intuits what the body needs. A friend had had tremendous success on her table, which always means a lot to me.
This new bodyworker was clearly perfectly competent, knowledgeable, serious. Experienced. She said this rib was out of place and this vertebrae was twisted and I needed to come back a few more times, and I believed her. But she made me uneasy with her brusk manor, her new, foreign touch. She had a system, which I don’t love — I don’t like feeling like a machine that just needs a tune-up. But this is just me: I like a two-way street when it comes to this kind of work, I like the conversation.
Because when you’ve had so many people’s opinions on how to fix you, you become weary of everyone. I could feel that I was holding myself away from her table, willing it to end. Nothing she did was too forceful or worrying, and yet, worry would not leave me. This I try not to ignore.
When I left, I was in a state of panic. I wasn’t in pain, per se, but something felt off — which was perhaps the entire point. Something was off. That was the entire reason I was there! And yet, it didn’t feel right off. I didn’t think? I didn’t know! I hated not knowing. All of this is one big exercise in relinquishing control, in trial and error.
As I am apt to do in this situation, I called my sister and promptly started to cry, worried that I’d let this person — in my words — “ruin me forever.”
Anyone with a brain will know that this is trauma talking; it is all the decades of walking — hopeful, afraid, vulnerable — into “healers” offices in search of something, forever at their mercy. Sometimes I’ve been offered relief, and other times, I’ve emerged no different. In rare instances, I have walked out worse for wear, heart a little more shattered and afraid. You simply never know. Even if people come highly recommended — and I never go to someone unvetted, and neither should you! — they might not be the right fit, or they might not be the right fit right now, or they might scare you but actually be helpful? (This might be the case with this woman!) We are all, in the end, in need of markedly different things at different times. Our bodies must guide us.
But we who need help carry the responsibility of worrying ourselves well — we are in constant search, trying something, praying it will make a dent. The most difficult part is when it doesn’t, fearing not only that we’ve wasted our money, but that we’ve done more damage to ourselves, that it is our fault. You stupid shit, you shouldn’t have tried something new! Things were good enough.
You’d think by now, after bouncing back so many times from so many flairs, after lying on countless tables in my underwear, I’d know that my body is resilient. That nothing is truly permanent. This is usually where my sister comes in. “This woman isn’t going to fix you forever,” she said in her calm, measured, loving way. “And she isn’t going to ruin you forever either.”
So often we are sold a solution: to feel better, to get out of pain, to lose weight, to keep the weight off, to find love, to fix our marriages, to fix our kids, to have better sex, just sign up here, just pay the $19.99 for the discount.
And sometimes there, indeed, are solutions: I’ve benefited enormously from so many doctors and bodyworkers over the last many decades, I’ve had great therapists, I’ve worked with registered dieticians and yoga teachers and Pilates teachers and I’ve lifted weights and I’ve slept more and I’ve changed my mattress and I’ve walked my steps and I’ve meditated and I’ve iced and I’ve drunk more water. All of those things have helped, but none have been permanent solutions to the problem of having a body, or as Kate Bowler always so beautifully says, there is no cure for being human.
When I get looped into a game of ‘which person will help me this time,’ what I am usually hoping for, if I’m being honest, is a saviour. I want someone to press on some buttons in my spine and send me back out into the world in a reformed body. Isn’t that what we all wish for? Or I, at least, want to leave able to forget about my body completely, which — for anyone who has dealt with chronic pain or illness — truly is the ultimate luxury. Forgetting.
Most of us know that this is an impossibility. We will repair ourselves (usually through a combination of things — no saviours here) and we will break just a little bit again, whether that means physically or psychologically. Over time, there is wear and tear, even if you’ve had it easy, and we will all have better and worse periods: the worse periods might appear out of nowhere, unbidden and misunderstood, they will obliterate any hope of health. And during the better periods, we will assume we are cured. The trick, which I still, after 20 years, have not mastered, is to not fling myself so violently from one extreme mindset to another. I cannot imagine when I will get this right.
Perhaps this is a life’s work, accepting that the body is a living thing. As I wrote that down, I noticed how stupid it sounds — of course the body is a living thing! — but also perhaps it’s so obvious we forget? I’ve always known it needs care and attention, and my God, do I give it a lot of mine. But perhaps I could also be kinder to myself about it all, about all the ups and downs. I could enjoy the easier times, and loosen up in the harder ones. I could live with what my sister said — that in some ways, not all will be found, but not all will be lost, either.
Sending love,
Abs xo
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