This Dusty Earth: Witchcraft in the City
A blog about mental health, magic, and the cycles of nature in parched Los Angeles.
Loving Your Body Doesn't Mean Thinking It's Perfect
It was a strange experience, having a birthday just days before David Bowie and Alan Rickman died. They were both 69. I turned 35. When I heard about their deaths I realized, with a mild but chilling existential awe, that my life could very well be half over.
Ha! Ha! I know what those of you who are older than me are thinking. Half over? At 35!? Sweetie, calm down. They both had cancer. You’re not even middle-aged yet.
Yeah, I know, I know. It wasn’t literal fear that I felt so much as the shock of mortality. I spent a few weeks pondering the afterlife. I renewed my efforts to set aside more time to write.
But, nevertheless, I have started to feel the subtle symptoms of aging--symptoms that I know are irreversible. Crows’ feet around my eyes. A few gray hairs. A sudden affinity for clothing styles that I never would have considered in my 20’s.
A few years ago, my wrist started to hurt whenever I put weight on it--particularly during yoga--and I was diagnosed with tendinitis. The doctor gave me some exercises to do and the yoga instructor tried to give me some workarounds, but the problem got worse and worse until I couldn’t do downward dog for more than a few seconds. Interestingly, no one told me that I should rest the joint or that tendinitis is curable; looking back, I have serious misgivings about that doctor. For years I thought tendinitis was like carpal tunnel syndrome: once you have it, you just live with it. No wonder the exercises never seemed to work.
The pain wasn’t the only reason I fell out of yoga, but it was a big factor. For awhile I went to very occasional classes and tried to do plank pose every day for my back, but a few weeks ago, the pain suddenly got worse and I noticed a bump on the back of my hand. Turned out it was a ganglion cyst, a sac of fluid that forms when the tendon’s sheath is weak or damaged. Now I’m finally getting proper treatment for my wrist. When I asked if I’d be able to do yoga again, though, the physical therapist was conspicuously evasive.
Unfortunately, treatment for my wrist has coincided with a pretty unpleasant treatment for the PET in my ear. It seems, over the past few years, that my body has gone through one mess after another. My mother in law is the type of person who always seems to fall prey to random medical problems--a bad shoulder here, a messed-up ankle there, lactose intolerance joined by gluten intolerance followed by a concussion that just won't heal. She has surgeries so often that sometimes she forgets to mention them to us. I’m starting to realize, with a sinking feeling, that my body may be similar to hers: especially prone, for whatever reason, to random problems and breakdowns. If it were a car, I’d be wondering if I got a lemon.
But of course you don’t want to think that about your body. Bodies are sacred, right?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of loving your body. To many, it means being happy about it, no matter what: I love my body, which means I wouldn’t change anything about it for anything! Except that loving something means having compassion for it, not pretending that you think it’s perfect. Maybe you’re allowed to not like your weight. Maybe you’re allowed to be pissed when you get back problems or arthritis. Maybe it’s okay if you wish that you didn’t have this or that disability. Accepting your body with its flaws, rather than pretending those flaws are features, is what real love looks like.
My treatment for the cyst, at the moment, consists of weekly ultrasound sessions and the lovely splint you see in the photo. It’s funny--I actually kind of like the way some medical hardware looks. There’s a strange, bracing kind of beauty to it. The same kind of beauty as a cliff face blasted with wind and sand for thousands of years, or a suit of armor dinged from previous battles. It’s the beauty of a body that’s surviving. The splint makes it harder to type this post, but I don’t mind wearing it all that much.
For if that which you seek, you find not in yourself, you will never find it without. Sometimes, when I'm looking for Shekhinah, I see her in the trees and the stars. But other times, I see her in my own changing body, my slow but inevitable journey through life and towards death. To love her is to love all the cells inside me, all the bones and tissues that are surviving.
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