December 12: Body Integration

Prompt: This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present? (Author: Patrick Reynolds)

Twice this week I've encountered something that left me saying, "I have no response to that." The first was when the Gentleman Caller told me that he reads my blog and sees a darker, sadder person than the one he knows in life. The other was in reading this prompt. This seems to be another prompt brought to you by the muse of bongs.

The wording is kind of interesting. Not the implication that people do feel like their mind and body are separate and don't feel the integration of the two. Note that the first sentence distinguishes between "you" and "your body," but the second brings the mind in as a third entity? The prompt invokes a mind, a body, and you, which is also "YOU, alive and present." Oh, jeez! Now I'm imagining all of this and feeling all jittery trying to separate the concept of the mind and the body and the you and the YOU, alive and present, and I have NOT been paying tribute to the muse of bongs. Of course, the jittery may be courtesy of my very large cup bestowed by my own muse.

Despite my mocking, I actually kinda get what this prompt means. As I have written, I put myself through a hell of eating disorders in my teens and early twenties. The disorders themselves -- that is, the behavior -- ended long ago; but, now, I'm not so sure the body dysmorphia ever went away. It got weaker, but didn't go away. All of which is to say that I haven't so much felt integrated or alienated from my body as locked in mortal combat with it. Not with a disease, like cancer, but with my own warped perceptions.

In my teens, I would often look down at my lap while I was sitting, seeing the natural spread of my thighs, and think that I wanted them to shrink, to get thinner, while all of the time wondering how thin would be thin enough. Then, I would realize that I wanted to completely disappear. This idea of disappearing did not disturb me. I just couldn't think about it too long because then I'd have to figure out why I wanted to disappear and then I'd probably have to do something about it and then I'd realize that I had no idea what to do about it and then I'd be much sadder. So I went to an aerobics class or dove into a book so I wouldn't have to think about it further.

That desire to disappear went away, mercifully. Now, I like doing things that make me feel the ability of my body. I like feeling that kinetic power in my limbs when I run a long distance (ran 9 miles last Friday!) or when I realize that I can still do a back bend (I think it is called "camel" or "wheel" or something like that in yoga) or stretch my legs all the way out to each side. I love the endorphin rush afterward, too.

This is all to say that -- again, despite my mocking -- I get the question, the feeling of being in your body rather than part of your body, like, say, a little alien creature riding about inside of a giant, person-shaped vehicle. It's much like the sensation of first putting on glasses and becoming aware of the frames around the edge of your vision. I would have intense periods of that feeling as early as age 6. In the first one I can remember, I felt myself looking through my eyes at my mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's sister and thinking, "why? They are all going to die." Yeah, I was depressive and morbid even then; and wore myself out trying not to be.

Again, all of that has gone away thanks to the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, modern psychotherapy, and simply saying "what the hell" and grasping toward anything that took me somewhere that might be better.

I still haven't answered the question; and I don't think I care to. In letting all of this spill out, knowing that I also have used this sort of mind/body language to describe what my therapists have called "dissociation," I realize that the metaphor is no longer entirely useful nor is it entirely descriptive of my own experience in my body. It isn't un-useful, it is just too shallow. Furthermore, the implication -- or maybe the inference -- is that the integration is always a good thing. A little bit of dissociation is not necessarily a bad thing.

Anyway, that implication -- or the inference -- that the outcome of the prompt writing will always be positive shows through either the wording of the prompt or in the way that it is couched in the self-help language prevalent in popular culture is the most off-putting thing about these prompts. Perhaps that is because the prompts are meant to be shallow, allowing the writer to take it wherever she wants. Perhaps that is because that self-help language is, in fact, so incredibly prevalent that imagining a different narrative from one celebrating perseverance or uplift or redemption is a revolutionary act. How do you phrase a prompt that will produce a more complicated story? How do you write that complicated story -- or, rather, end it? The ending is so crucial.

All of which is to say that I'm having difficulty complicating this particular prompt because of my own limited skills in revolutionary imagination. The wisdom prompt provoked my alternate disturbing prompt because wisdom -- and I began to question what wisdom was supposed to mean -- would probably come from facing that Smoke Monster living on the limits of your understanding of yourself. The party prompt led to the vice prompt for reasons about which I am not entirely certain, but seem to be related to the fact that I'd rather hear someone tell about their vices than their parties. The vices might reveal something more interesting about them, too. So, I'm trying to come up with an inspired alternate prompt for this one. One that might produce something more complicated or one that is at least snarky.

Perhaps the old turning-the-question-on-its-head trick might work? I think of the times when I became particularly aware of my own race or my gender or even my age -- something about my outward appearance about which I could do nothing -- and felt the opposite of mind/body integration. The first time was probably in the second or first semester of teaching when I was describing the Mexican War and referred to the American troops as "we." "We" had hardly left my mouth when I realized, looking out over my class of predominantly Hispanic students, that not all of us in the room were part of that "we." Yeah, I just figured that out right then, too. Cluelessness runs in the family, too.

I still get that feeling of sudden disjunction, like when I'm the only white person in the room when teaching African American history. This sudden awareness of my body, a sensation from which my privilege has protected me from for my whole life, and the social implications of being in this particular type of body come into sharp relief. I've felt it when I'm in a group of men who start making sexist joke, or when idiots in public feel the need to catcall. This isn't so much a dissociation, but just an awareness that your body does matter.

So, I suppose that is the core of my alternate, although I can't quite get the phrasing right no matter how many times I revise it:

Prompt: When did you first feel separate from your body? That is, how did you become aware that your race or gender or some immutable feature of yourself set you apart and would in some way define your experience of the world?

Perhaps those are two separate questions.