Body Mania
Eve wanted to know everything, so God gave her the one thing she couldn’t intellectualize: a human body. Pretty killer curse, if you ask me, to know you’re perpetually dying and can’t do anything about it. To watch this crude husk deteriorate, your soul painfully in tact inside a ticking time bomb. To do everything you can to try to bring to heel such a fallible host with its snot and shit and ever-weakening knees.
It would be better not to have a body. To come out of your mother as you really are (a beam of light, a bullet missing its mark, the entire fucking sun). To have a body is to grieve. And it’s not like you signed up for this, the curse of having a body that can’t be perfect, whatever that means. Who does? You don’t get a tutorial on the responsibilities of the body, the ways to treat it with respect or the fact that sometimes your body unintentionally becomes a weapon. How do you love your body during a pandemic? How do you love your body when it’s designed to fail?
The point is that you can’t be the fucking sun; the sun’s already filled the position. You have to be a human with a human body and that means watching it break down.
Some things I know about the body:
- Your skin craves other skin the way you crave a donut.
- Some diseases don’t kill you themselves; it’s the stress that sends your body into overdrive.
- Your body knows when you’re in danger before you do.
Unfortunately, everything I know about human nature makes these three truths completely self-defeating.
If you’re not a hypochondriac, a pandemic might be the only time you understand what it’s like to walk around wondering when your body will inevitably betray you. Personally, I’ve often played a little game with myself and the universe: I call it Death Chicken. It starts with me agonizing about some bodily harm befalling me — in most cases, an aneurysm, one of those things I could never control — and as I agonize about it, I decide that, because I’ve imagined it, it couldn’t possibly actually happen to me, and then because I’ve actively recognized that it won’t happen to me, I’m certain that it will, but because I’m so certain that it will, it certainly won’t, and around and around I go until I’ve exhausted myself into a fitful sleep.
I know, I know, I’m crazy to admit this in so public a space, but now that we have to avoid each other, we’re all high-powering our vulnerability like it’s an extreme sport, aren’t we?
To offer my non-expert analysis, hypochondria stems from control, from the fact that certain elements of my body will always be left up to chance. But, personally, I think it stems from something else too: that living in a body is a skill that I’ve never managed to master. Often my body feels too big for the soul inside it, too clumsy, too needy — but then I wonder if that’s not a common human feeling, that to live in a body is to feel out of sorts. Are we all walking around, feeling this strange unbalance? Does Beyonce think these same thoughts about her body? Does she, too, lie awake at night, wondering, “When will the timer will run out on my mortal form?”
It would be easier if we could talk to our bodies, ask them directly about this ache or that pain, but instead we play guessing games and hope for the best.
The worst part about hypochondria is that it’s only irrational until you turn out to be right. Until you really do have cancer, until you happen upon the right pain, until there’s a global pandemic with a disease that probably won’t kill you, unless it does.
But, hey, something has to kill you in the end.
By far my favorite go-to comfort, before stress-eating and miles before stress-cleaning, is retail therapy. Color me Carrie, but nothing brings me momentary comfort like the thrill of thrifting the perfect new summer dress in the midst of a mental breakdown. Walking out of the shop, the world always sits right on its axis again, however briefly, as if a new article of clothing might mean a fresh start.
We really don’t give clothes enough credit for everything they do for us, the ways they make it less embarrassing to be in a body. With clothes, you tell a story, choose which character to play, and whether your battle armor looks like sweatpants or a ball gown, you’ve still made that choice. It’s a theater, the way we dress our bodies every morning, trying to use the material element to represent what can never solidly manifest. Would personality be liquid or a gas?
Even now, in my constant rotation of sweatpants, I’ll leap from my bed at two in the morning and throw open my closet, just to run a hand over all the fabric hanging there, waiting for a wearer. Pick out a dress and twirl in the mirror, just to see my body do something other than sink into my couch.
“I’d kill myself,” I sometimes laugh, never in the dead of night but always at two in the afternoon when the sun shines brightest, “but who would wear all my clothes?”
One day you will die.
One day you will die.
It’s a joke without a punchline. A play without a denouement. One day you will die because that’s the way bodies are: they’re here, they work, and one day, they don’t. Life is a series of events designed to distract us from this fact, but it’s harder to ignore when 150,000 people drop dead in two months, killed by the very thing that could come for you next. It’s easy to forget this used to be a daily kind of fear, before vaccines, before the miracle of modern medicine.
One day you will die. It’s a shitty kind of mantra, isn’t it?
The worst thing I ever learned about the human body is that the strongest bone isn’t the sternum, like you might suspect. It’s the femur. Which is to say: we are made for running.
The only consolation is that it’s left up to us to decide whether we’re meant to run from or towards one another.
