Back in My Body, Caring Too Much
I experience my body as power these days. She is thunderous, heavy, and warm. I am changing in the mirror. When I touch my fingers to my thighs, I watch in wonder as I experience what this body can do for me, who I am because of her. I remember staring helplessly at the same places last year as tidal waves of anxiety and nausea wiped away inches from me, how it willowed out my legs and shrunk down my favorite parts of myself. When I look at photos from last summer and remember how I came to look that way, I wince. These are some of my least favorite photos of myself, some of my least favorite moments in my body - weak, hurting, empty, depressed. I have gained the weight back. I am hungry again. I am sensual again. There was no space for wonder or peace or pleasure.
Today, my body reminds me of how certain I am, where rivers of emotion, teeming and thunderous and intense, diffuse into an energy grid underneath me. A lighthouse showing me the next right step. I make choices which stitch me into the fabric of my world, which is vast and expansive. Here, I am a channel. I am flow. I am driver. I am thick and solid and flexible into these muscles which hum happily when I push them to move faster, lift heavier, dig deeper. I am learning to run longer distances. I am not a very confident runner, but I have been surprising myself with how far I can go. How far steady breaths and pushing my focus down into my thighs will take me. My body is not a machine but a wild animal, playing and resting on her own terms.
Finally.
I could not have reimagined myself into this space on my own. I also could not have done it living in Seattle. I had to move away from every story I have written, every role I have played in my family, with my friends, in my adolescence, in my childhood. The first night I spent in Cambridge, I felt my breath actually reach my lungs. Without realizing, I had been shallow breathing for a year. To live without a deep breath was to live in an absent body, an absolute fission between myself and the world. Breathing suddenly became pleasure. And because pleasure is generally not subjected to the pursuit of ultimate meaning (as in, it does not really exist to be poked or investigated), I gave myself permission to feel it fully. This was instantaneous relief. I pursued this feeling relentlessly. I followed it across sprawling green fields, over bubbling streams, among new friends, into unfamiliar classrooms. I had to abandon everything I was in order to remember who I am in joy.
How could I have forgotten?
Once I had properly forsaken myself, I swam up familiar streams, ones that I had not touched in years, thinking through my body. Playing women’s soccer re-familiarized myself with the phrases, “I can”, and “I love”. I reveled in growing stronger, finally locating myself as here, now. We forget to whom our bodies answer to until we ask, or demand, them to answer to us. Women’s soccer taps into an energy field of masculinity without ever sacrificing the divine feminine. We work hard in this energy field of certainty, where it is only us and each other to trust. We have a position to play, a job to do, a responsibility that runs deep into the ground. We move and flex as a collective that is loyal only to each other. Our victories are shared, our bodies are heat, our breaths are deep. We find and touch each other, hands, fingers, backs, arms – in support, in shared struggle, in elation, in disappointment. For those ninety minutes, we are women who run the world. We do not ask for permission, we do not shrink, we do not compromise, we do not accommodate. In this scrappy fight for victory, we are technical, collaborative, and joyful, even as we shove our bodies into each other. That field belongs to the women who go to battle on it.
I remember standing in the players’ tunnel, about to walk onto the Oxford City FC pitch, jaw taut with resolve. I am channeling. In the stands are people I love and adore, who have known me, raised me, loved me, witnessed me. Friends who have shown up for me. Today, my teammates and I become warriors, and we emerge into the sunlight with shoulders pulled back, proud. We know that we are the ones who bend reality out here. These nerves have been thick in my throat like this since I was five years old. I cannot swallow, I cannot think, and I pull all the world into my feet as I move into position. This is not sickness or fear, not survival mode, not anxiety. Rather, this is the deep knowing that this is something I must do, a way of being that I cannot turn away from – something I must be responsible for. And then the whistle blows, and we become light and heat. I don’t know why I need to do it, just that I must. A flash, a moment, and it’s halftime. I am exhausted, alive, enlightened. We go again. I am subbed off the field in the 80th minute and collapse straight into my parents’ arms, obliterated and shaking with the sheer concentration of feeling running through me. Gratitude, overwhelm, exhaustion, power, strength, grief. It is such a potent, pure source of who I am, a place where I need no reminder of where I belong, to whom my priorities lie, or what matters to me. My body knows what to do. All that is required of me is to jump in the jet stream. That has been the theme of this year for me. It has been terribly painful and deeply miraculous.
Tears flow, and I do not attempt to stifle them.
I am currently attempting to integrate this kind of knowing and certainty into the other fields of my life where I am not so sure, where I falter and stumble, when I am caught out of position. I am too easily dissuaded from my own power when I am on my own. Perhaps this is because I feel more alone in the decisions I make now. Because I have the final say in my choices, I am more isolated in my movements. I flex and move as an individual, but I ache for a collective when I’m knee-deep in struggle. With women, I know who I am. As woman, I’m not so sure.
My old ways of understanding the world have stopped working in the ways they used to. What this has revealed to me is what old patterns get to stay and which patterns need to be trimmed and let go. Here are some of my fundamental beliefs & thought patterns that I’m ready to release.
That people will only love me if I do enough to be loved by them.
That people hurt me because I did not do enough to be loved by them.
That the easiest pathway to significance is in strategic and specific generosity.
That people consistently fall short of my expectations of them.
That if I need too much, the people I love will leave me.
That how I look is directly related to how loved I am.
So much of these are related to worthiness, to how love is built and sustained between people, to do with ego, strategy, validation, anxiety, or obligation. They have deep roots. I can see the people who raised me in them. I can see the people who betrayed me in them. I can see choices I have made, the history of how I came to be in this moment. What I take comfort in, though, is that the revelation must come before the work can begin. When the distance between you and you disappears, when you stand before an accurate, well-lit reflection, what makes you avert your eyes? Putting words to those thought patterns wiped me out for two days. It was not a shame spiral. It simply hurt.
Working on yourself is never done well in isolation. We cannot smooth out our kinks on our own, in the solace of our own minds, set apart from the world so that one day we may emerge healed and whole and ‘ready’, for whomever and whatever awaits us. Relationships are where we learn, really learn, about how to be. They are mutually constitutive. I am because you are. We become together. It’s like language. More than mere words, a person is always doing something by saying something. Who I am – who you are – is constructed and made in relationships – the social world of being cannot be ‘opted out’ of, not lest we imprison ourselves in isolation which will ultimately kill us.
The prevailing Western meta-narrative is that a person is an individual first, and he who belongs to himself foremost owes nothing to anyone (he, for this individual has always been male). This serves institutions of power well, for working in isolation prevents coalition, change, discovery, creativity, collaboration. This mutual self-isolation is a great strategy to get people to play an active role in their own subjugation. But ‘becoming’ alone will never succeed. In a storied sense, there are no individuals among us. We are situated amongst each other – any attempt to disengage from the collective in the pursuit of self-growth will fail. I wonder why people still attempt to do this so often. I wonder if it’s an attempt to control the process, to establish dominion over the factors and therefore the outcome.
I wonder if anyone believes, truly, that it will all be okay in the end.
People are going to hurt us. Many of them will not care that they did. And sometimes, they are the ones we love and adore the most, those whom we hold in utmost reverence. Those whom we have given ourselves over to with a silent plea, “Please. Treat me kindly.” Their betrayal will render us speechless. It is a degradation of our humanity, a violation of our faith in them. We have no control over this. I would not expect anyone to be grateful for this kind of heartbreak; however, it is an experience that we will each find ourselves in the midst of and therefore we must have faith that we will be led somewhere new through it. I suppose the challenge we must take up in response is to resist the urge to become someone who, also, does not care.
Resist the urge to numb out. Care in excess. Let things matter. Let things matter too much. Caring too much will be more painful than caring too little. It will be embarrassing. You will get teased, affectionately and resentfully, often both at once. Be prepared for an array of infantilizing comments. You will be highly visible, open, and vulnerable to criticism. You will need to be strong. And yet, when presented with all of the reasons not to, take a deep breath and do it anyways. Challenge yourself to opt in rather than out. Stay. Stay, and complicate. Witness. Disavow passivity. Whatever you do, do it deeply. Trust that you will be beautifully and wonderfully made as you go. Your healing will happen. This is processual, but certain.
Disavow the dominant story of your life; this dominant story is crowding out room for the unexpected. You’ll find these dominant stories in your reflection, in your thought patterns, in your reactions, in your justifications. Watch how you respond in stress. Listen to the words you use to speak about others – and the words you use to speak about yourself. What would happen if you made room for new meanings, if you made space for alternative stories? Look at the requirements for your problems’ survival and then undermine those requirements – starve the problem out. To face a hard reality is heartbreaking but acceptance makes some degree of movement possible. Be creative with how you slot experiences, relationships, and moments into the frameworks you live within, especially those experiences which fall outside of your dominant story. Get comfortable with living in liminal space, because this is where hypothesis, desire, fantasy, and conjecture play to transform.
Here is where the pursuit of ourselves truly begins.
Author's Note: I have lots of life updates to share! I’m planning on doing so on the 4th anniversary of The Olly Project, which is April 26th. See you then, xoxo