Letter To My Body, This Body

My body, this

body, that has

nothing to do

with who

I am.

-Sandra Cisneros, from Well, If You Insist

I don’t know when I started needing to use past tense whenever I talked about your finest moments, but I do know I use past tense now.

You were always strong, always athletic, always moving. You were adventurous and brave, definitely too brazen at times.

Sometimes I make excuses. Most of the time I can’t.

Instead, I muse and dance whimsically around the excessive curves that have replaced a once slender and fit figure I was proud to call my own. You, my busy body, aching to be busy again.

In the spring of my senior year of high school you failed me, ever so slightly. Nothing too serious, nothing requiring surgery, nothing even requiring physical therapy, and yet, I couldn’t run. I couldn’t run for the first time in my life and I was forced to stand still. To dismay I have yet to overcome, I can’t remember really running since.

I became afraid. Afraid of something I never anticipated I would fear, leery of a monster I never saw lurking in dark corners of my bedroom, a debilitating creature I failed to see hiding under any bed.

I feared the pain I knew from experience would be associated with planting my foot hard against the track again, against concrete, against grass. I feared how out of shape my legs and lungs had become so quickly; I feared the pain it would require to train them to breath quickly and deeper, to sustain me while I pushed the rest of you physically to your breaking point, while I pushed myself mentally to my own. I feared being able to operate resting limbs at 100% functionality for I feared I had forgotten how to push myself, how to thrive during any kind of physical adversity.

Starting college with my foot still tender whenever I tried to firmly plant it, I tried a variety of other extra-curricular activities to pass the time and to keep you and my ever-analytical mind occupied. A week of rising before dawn for crew practice was enough for both of us. I was already mentally finished with basketball, even after regretting quitting senior year. I had started too early. So early. It would take years to eradicate the muscle memory of pivots, bounce passes, fast-breaks.

I drug you to the pool and it was love at first chlorine bath. Limbs having been taught breast, back and freestyle strokes from the time I was six, you and I have always felt at home in the water, perpetually graceful and peaceful and yet able and strong, my thoughts never clearer than when you were diving to the bottom of a pool.

What is more, finally, all of you seemed on board. There were no aches, no pains, nothing beyond the fully expected soreness of lungs and limbs that would need to be overcome. The pool and all of me seemed the perfect physical fit. And yet again, my fear of a work ethic I had all but been forced to abandon a year before stopped you mid-stroke.

After initially fearing only what it would take both mentally and physically to carry myself back to a high and desired level of fitness, I started to fear being well again because I feared the responsibility and the implications. I had started wondering what I was going to do next, what I wanted to do next.

I knew that after college I didn’t want to be Only An Athlete, and yet it was all I ever was. An athlete and a book-worm, and I was craving middle-ground. I wanted to be an artist, to be pretty, to be gentle and dainty and feminine, and yet I didn’t know how. I couldn’t reconcile how I could palm a men’s basketball–how I could traverse a court or a track, or swim a lap–with how to wear a skirt and not feel horribly self-conscious and silly while doing it.

I remember when movement wasn’t difficult, when motivation wasn’t cumbersome. I remember never shying away from anything that put you in perpetual motion, never avoiding anything that ensured muscles and joints would ache and scream the next day. I loved making you sore. It was proof we were working together, that we were becoming better, together. I looked forward to days after strenuous gym workouts, to afternoons after hill workouts, after sprinting, jogging, biking around streets you and I knew by heart, by route.

You see, we weren’t always warring against one another, you and I. We used to be a brilliant team. But for years now we have been pushing and pulling one another in opposite directions, and you and I both know it’s exhausting.

I don’t want to fight you. I don’t want to have to fight so hard to bend you, shape you, sweat you into something recognizable again. And yet, I know I will have to claw and scream and rage against muscles that have gone too long unused, against mental strength that has been allowed to atrophy.

My only hope is that once I begin to help you remember who we once were, when the mornings get even earlier and the workouts even longer, on the days I will mentally want to quit before even beginning, that you will help remind me, too.

I do so want to love you.

My body, this body, who has everything and nothing to do with who I am.

Merry Mélange

It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

-from A River Runs Through It → Read more...

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