For many years, until relatively recently actually, I treated my body like an unwieldy appendage attached to my head at my neck that I had to suffer through because it was what lugged me around. When I thought of myself, I truly only considered me from the neck up. This perspective is evidenced by an endless quantity of neck-up head shot photos of myself, years of me telling whoever was taking my picture to just take it from “here up” (hand motion to my neck). I didn’t want my ugly and unsightly (to me) body being immortalized in any picture. I didn’t want to have to see it or acknowledge it. I was told I had a pretty face and that I was smart, so if everything could just be about my head, it would be all right.
Neck up, please!
Except that it wasn’t. My body is a gift. Just like everyone’s is. What it can do is biology and also magic. Just the muscles working in unison for me to type these words, how my hands move, the signals that my brain sends to direct them are all phenomenons of immense complexity and brilliance. Computer scientists spend years creating robots that can do what my hands do without me even thinking about it. And as I sit here on the couch typing and breathing there are so many amazing functions happening: my heart beating, pushing blood, my lungs filling with oxygen, my eyes, skin, ears, and nose sending signals to my brain. The feel of the couch under my legs and the hardwood on my bare feet – miracles all of it. That I spent most of my life wanting to disregard this amazing vessel of my physical self is so sad. That I wanted to do so because I felt shame in it is heartbreaking.
This is my body, and it is worthy.
My body is my home. It is my guide also. Through my body I feel and experience; everything I know of the world comes to me through my physical self. Everything I experience, I feel in my body; all my emotions have sensations that go with them: the bubbling joy of seeing people I love, the racing heart of excitement, the constriction in my chest when I am scared, the heaviness of grief.
I ignored my body for so much of my life because it was also a way to ignore my feelings and what I experienced. It’s a coping mechanism that worked well when I was young, when I needed to escape, when it was the best way to protect myself. I was taught in many ways that it was not okay to be myself, that some, but not all, of my feelings were acceptable. So I hid the ones that weren’t. I hid parts of myself and then I hid from myself.
I was so detached from myself that I could eat huge portions of food, gain weight and not understand how or when the weight gain had happened. I could eat until I felt sick and then wait just enough time for the nausea to pass before I ate some more. I ate my feelings instead of having them, feeling them, and expressing them. I ate to stay separate from myself.
And it worked. Really well. Feeling numb and separate and hidden had benefits. It was harder for me to get hurt (even though, somehow, I felt hurt most of the time), and I felt protected from the world (even though I was just isolating myself). Eventually though the costs were too high and the pain (of trying to avoid pain) was too great. So I started the long journey of coming back to myself.
I’m still understanding all the ways in which I disregard myself, how I dismiss my body instead of honoring and loving it. It takes constant consciousness – which I don’t always have – to be kind to my body, instead of judging it. The judgment comes so immediately, and it is mean and ugly. But more and more I realize that there is no true health and no true care for myself without true acceptance of myself. Right now as I am today and however I will be tomorrow.
Always.
New Comfort Food 