The body breaks

and moves and shrieks and bends and transforms

It feels like I’ve been at odds with my body for as long as I can remember. The truth is, though, that I’ve spent far more time collaborating with my body than I’d like to admit when I’m feeling sorry for myself. The internal battle started as a child, walking down the streets of Wan Chai in Hong Kong with a stomach ache. For months on end, I had this mysterious, persistent stomach ache, probably borne out of an overly anxious predisposition. Then, as a pre-teen when I noticed I didn’t quite have the same figure as the girls in the music videos I watched on repeat. I used to devour Hello! and Grazia magazine, its high level pages moulding my young brain. It was clear to me then that I would never be as skinny as Tara Palmer-Tomkinson or Lizzy Jagger, which in retrospect were impossible standards to hold myself to. Then, in my late teens and early 20s, I escaped my body and all its innumerable feelings by any means necessary through drugs, alcohol, obsession, and other people.

The culture we ingest and the world we live in instills this idea that we must push against our body. To mould it into something it simply is not. Eventually, after having my body broken in two and building it back up, you’d think I would have gathered up some reverence for this earthly vessel. Nope. Once I inhabited my body again, body image neuroses crept back in. They paraded themselves around my head - making themselves heard - distracting me with ideas of what a perfect body should be. How much of my life have I wasted worried about how slim I look in an outfit? How much breath has been constricted around the tightness of my jeans? How silly that I have not spent more time laying flowers at the altar of my body and adorning her with love, reverence, and jewels.

The body - my body specifically - continually breaks in order to make itself heard. It screams at times, it shouts in my ear for days and months on end before I tend to it. It mystifies me, stumps me: WHAT DO YOU NEED I scream back, as if it were a petulant pre-verbal child, unable to tell me what it wants and needs. Sometimes, I ignore and abuse it as if I were just a floating head hurtling through space without an entire world below my neck. It knows much more about what it needs than what my mind could ever communicate. The problem is that I forget to listen. 

I’ve been more in touch with the life available in my body lately, in part because we are witnessing mass death all over the world, and especially at an unimaginable pace and scale in Gaza. As I bear witness to the deaths of so many, sorrow and helplessness march in. And yet, I still have my life. I still have a body to tend to each day. I still have a home in which to take care of myself. I get blood taken, and it reminds me of how lucky I am; my access to medical care is not a guarantee for so many people. And as such, the least I can do is bear witness.

In some ways, my body is failing. It’s breaking down, it’s not thriving. In others, it is only metaphorically dying to be birthed anew. Where is the boundary between my insides and the world I inhabit? When I imagine how my heart pumps blood all day long, I can’t quite see it. Is it actually happening? I think about the space where my gallbladder used to be, I think about the many people who have had theirs removed, too, and I wonder what we’re all doing with all the space we have. Should I store my summer clothes in there during winter? Maybe it could become the lockbox for my old passports. Can it keep my memories, facts I’ll never be able to remember, phone numbers I used to know? I become acutely aware of the space when I eat more butter than I should, and new meaning is ascribed to the phrase ‘gut punch’.

Having stepped so close to death and sipped in its qualities, having seen the love available within it — it feels like the easy part. It was so warm, so inviting. It seems much harder to be alive, though I desperately want my life and always have (even when I haven’t). My experience is, of course, limited, and the more I know, the less I am sure about anything at all. Life is a continual shattering, our worlds so often become hollow with grief. When I think about life it’s much more fraught, more painful. To be sure, to be awake and alive is to be met consistently with the enormity of the world’s pain. To be awake and alive is also to be met with the vastness of its beauty.

It’s remarkable to me that, especially in the West, we avoid thoughts of death; we avoid intimacy with it. The thing is, though, the hairy truth of it: we are continually dying. How many endings have you had to endure? How many doors have you had to close? How many times have you had to say goodbye? How many new versions of yourself do you meet at every new juncture? With every ending, a new experience is around the corner, a new friend, a new piece of art to digest, a new life altogether — one the old you might find unrecognizable. Death feels more sorrowful for those of us who stay behind. My own death will be a joyful and exuberant demarcation of my existence, and I hope to know it intimately at the time of my passing. For now my body will break and keep breaking, and I’ll continue to meet it anew - each time a different version of myself. 

With love,

Nora x