Bodies

or a topic I really don't like

Have you ever read a story that’s written in first person and never seems to leave the narrator’s brain? I’ve found a lot of Young Adult falls in that category, but I recently read an adult rom-dram that was the same way. On one hand, first person brings you intimately into the character’s emotions and desires, but it ignores the fact there’s anything going on outside that character’s mind. A disembodied head that bops from chapter to chapter just thinking all over the pages.

That is me. I am that disembodied head.

I recently finished All Fours by Miranda July—decidedly not a rom-dram—and while the book is too graphic for me to say I enjoyed it in a traditional reading sense (I’m not a prude, I’m just not into sex being described like open-heart surgery), I couldn’t stop reading it because the conversations around womanhood, marriage, sex, and relationships in general are so good. Reading it felt like studying a surrealist painting. There’s just enough reality to recognize yourself and it pulls you in to find out what version of you July has seen. A bit uncanny. Regardless of its explicit language and general weirdness, there is so much truth in this book. Language and weirdness included.

There are many topics I would love to examine more and talk about with friends, especially the “room of one’s own” theme which is my actual favorite part. It could be the source of a book club discussion for months. But this is the theme that’s prompting this essay (of which, I recognize, is also solely inside my head):

Mind-rooted vs body-rooted.

The concept is referring to sex but like everything else in this book, it’s about a lot more. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how mind-rooted I am—that disembodied head—floating through my life, thinking all over the place. And when I wrote that aging prompt a few weeks ago, it reminded me how much I ignore my body altogether. Like the toddler who covers her own eyes and says “you can’t see me”. Can’t I just stick with I think, therefore I am?

No, says July, you cannot. And especially not in perimenopause. Your body is not going to let you, even if you try. If I hadn’t already been talking to a couple older women friends, between the heart palpitations and constant hot flashes/night sweats that started up this year, I probably would have thought I was dying. I went to the doctor just in case I was dying, but no, I’m fine. Just premenopausal.

With all of this spinning in my head these last six months or so, plus reading this book, and especially how for most of my life I’ve never had a woman in my life who talked about any of this—I dealt with my period on my own, sex on my own, birth control on my own, pregnancy on my own. See the pattern? Not great—until now. Thank you friends! It all made me want to share body stories and hear body stories and try harder to embrace the fact that, yes, Jess, you have a body. God. The horror!

Other than childbirth, the most unignorable you-have-a-body event, I went through a few spans of medical misery by the time I was in my mid-thirties. Medical crises made it impossible for me to ignore my physicality, so for a good chunk of my life, the painful experiences that forced me out of my head and into my body, to name a few: an emergency appendectomy, a ten-day intestinal blockage, early degenerative disc disease (which, sadly, just continues to progress), a urethral sling operation after a few humiliating years of fully peeing my pants in public, pelvic therapy, and urine flow tests. Between all of that and three pregnancies and deliveries, there was hardly a time someone was between my legs for a good reason.

No wonder I stayed in my head.

Over the last decade this has changed a lot for me. One very small example being I actually hug people now. And I (usually) like it! The bigger example being I have a well-rounded relationship with my husband—mind and body.

But I find that I still spend the most amount of time in my own brainspace, I approach life with thoughts rather than feelings, I analyze everything through writing—I don’t like therapy—I read, read, read. And I observe, somewhat obsessively, people’s mannerisms, how strangers move around each other in a grocery store, tone of voice in conversations I’m not part of, shades of color in a mushroom, fragrances. But I don’t frequently engage, touch, or taste.

So, July’s treatment of the mind/body rooted “problem” struck me less in a sexual way and more just as the way one moves through the world—thinking or feeling. I have friends who are in the latter camp and it seems significantly more painful, challenging, and raw, and sometimes it’s hard for me to understand why they feel so much. But I don’t think either of us move the way we move on purpose. It’s something in our wiring. I’m not avoidant when it comes to the facing the tough stuff of life, I face it differently.

Which always brings me back to the day nearly fifteen years ago my mom said: “If I’d brought you to the doctor when you were little, I think they would have said you were autistic.”

It’s hard for me to put that statement down because number one: I don’t think of myself as on the spectrum, I just think of me as me. (Nor do I feel the need to be diagnosed at this point, if I am) And number two: “IF I brought you to a doctor” rings the truth bell of neglect she acknowledged, albeit adjacent to her point. It’s been one of a half-dozen truth bombs my mother has dropped casually in my lap over the years. Everytime, she holds onto them tightly, right down to the end of the fuse, and then tosses to me. “Good luck!”

Now, as I cruise into the next big transition of my life, it would be easy for me to face it head-on alone, just like many past transitions. Instead, I’m grateful for books full of tough conversations like All Fours, for my older women friends who tell me How It Is, for new light being shed on women’s bodies and minds in the medical and scientific communities, for all the conversations that are happening.

We are both mind and body. But I’ve spent so much time in one place, I think that’s why this year I was finally able to embrace exercise as a way to get strong rather than skinny, and I’ve learned to love cooking—and enjoy eating—and I’m going to try to embrace my once-more changing body as I head into the second half of my life and accept that I’m also more prone to thinking than feeling. And I think that’s okay.