Chapter 6: On Body Dysmorphia - Who Is Wellness For?

It’s taken me a long time to articulate that I’m an incest survivor. When you face the kind of trauma I have in the just-over-thirty years of life, some things begin to blur and other things are accepted as just the way things are. I cannot exaggerate how long I’ve felt as if, though terrible, my life had happened, the past had passed, and I was desperately trying to look forward, to forge a new life. Maybe the reason I’m so obsessed with looking at everything is because I spent so much time in the shadows of my life, in the back seat, believing I was not in control of what happened to me.

It’s why I moved to New York, leaving my life in Australia far behind me. When people would admire my bravery, I brushed over the details of my past, believing that the mirage I was trying to build would be impenetrable, and that the life I was creating would stand in for my former life. Sooner or later, I’d be so far from it that it would never be able to catch up to me. I was running away from home, but quietly. I didn’t want to alarm my mother but wanted to go far enough so she couldn’t bring me back. I felt as if I was abandoning my family, but I hid from those ugly feelings, and my rhetoric of failure festered into guilt.

I guess I didn’t know what was happening to me as a child because there was never a reprieve from it. Now, after a few years of therapy, I can trace and see how on top of all of this, the impacts of her physical abuse and the sado-sexual parts of the abuse were never something I interrogated. Everyone is groomed by their aggressor to rationalize the situation. So, as a child you learn to fight against yourself. I was taught a narrative that vulnerability is a weakness, that acknowledging trauma is unconscionable. You live with these things and the cycle continues. But that wasn’t how I wanted my life to turn out, so when I finally got far away from the miasma of my past, I started at the very beginning by asking questions like Why? Why did I have this fucked-up life?

My body was never mine to begin with. When I first started to question what Maté describes as “civil war inside the body,” the memories I had hidden, the dirty secrets stuffed inside the folds of my skin, began to appear like apparitions. I believe they came as I was ready. I had just ended the most long-term and significant relationship of my life, and after what I had deemed a “failure” or “failing,” I think psychologically a part of me broke. This conception of myself that I’d been holding on to, this person who was “together” or “had answers” no longer seemed true. So much of who I am was shrouded in fear because I thought the real me was too much, too loud, too everything. To step into your power when you’ve never been allowed to is an exhausting struggle, because the rewiring is required at such a formative, and sometimes inaccessible, part of yourself. I’ve had to connect to a lost self and send her a signal after keeping her trapped in a hole underground for so many years, denying her the right to even speak, to even voice her perspective to me. Whenever she would get close, I would scream like I was being sucked up by a Dementor. To revisit painful memories made me extremely scared.

I’ve been dissociating for longer than I can remember, and for most of my life I actually thought disassociation was normal. I assumed I must not know how to be a person, and because nobody was teaching me or taking me into account, that’s when I began to dream. In that world, I just was. Accepted. Not a body, or a person, or a kid. Confused by my function as a person and already feeling deep existential dread by the age of ten, I decided that I would learn how to serve others, while fantasizing about killing myself. I thought to martyr myself would give me the love I deserved, but also the recognition of keeping other people’s secrets in my body, the way I kept quiet, how my body took punishment. There was a part of me that wanted both, complete destruction but also love, a partner, a family. It’s actually what I have wanted the most—people to love me, all of me, wholly.

For the majority of my life, I was considerate, I was kind, I was organizing at school and excelling at leadership. At home, I was desperately afraid of punishment, and got enough of it already, so I tried very hard to be whatever anyone needed of me. As a lot of my mother’s abuse over me was possession—possessiveness over my body and personhood—I wasn’t allowed out of the house; in fact, nobody was. So, we all stayed in the perimeters, always within my mother’s reach, always there to satiate some untenable want. I felt watched when she was around and surveilled at a distance when she wasn’t near. Her presence was a void and felt vampiric but overly critical in nature, so I was always expecting judgment. All of this made me extremely, exhaustingly hypervigilant.

As I got older, I began to seek out people who reminded me of my mother, finding comfort in the familiarity. Until only very recently I thought of it as a result of an astrological placement, as I was ruled by Saturn, which I knew meant I liked challenge, hard work, and difficulty as a means for evolution. It took me a while to understand it didn’t have to be this way, that I had agency to restructure a new dynamic with people who I presumed loved me. Even still, because I was conditioned to live in fear at all times, my imagination didn’t expand to the possibility that I could have a peaceful life. One way or another, we perpetuate trauma, many of us even pursue it, because we fall into its cyclical nature. No surprises, but duh, conditioning conditions you. This also comes back to limiting beliefs, as well as policing the imagination. Trauma is the link. If you cannot fathom being happy, do you think you’re ever going to really get it, be it? The more you deny yourself joy, by not even believing in its possibility, the more you encourage the lack of it. This might seem to those in the rational camps as a form of toxic positivity, but I don’t know what to tell you—the moment I stopped victimizing myself, something shifted.

*  *  *

I distinctly remember when my gender dysphoria began. Around ten, after my father’s first trip to Malaysia, I received Adidas tracksuit knockoffs, and like a Tenenbaum, I wore them everywhere. It was the first item of clothing that I felt was made for my body. Nothing was too tight over my suddenly voluptuous physique. I hated my feminine aspects, always have. At the time I was playing a lot of sports as a way to offset my ugliness, and, I assume, to give myself and my body some use.

We were living in ultra-white 1990s suburbia Brisbane. I constantly felt like the odd one out, so I would lie about my life to fit in. I told everyone that my parents made $500,000 a year and drove BMWs. It was a kind of wealth I knew bought respect, and I wanted to have a reason to be respected. If it wasn’t for my presence or personality, it would be for the lies I told. I was always performing, always a little class clown trying to make everyone like me. Then, one day, this was all exacerbated. On the soccer field, just before a game, I was sexually assaulted by another girl my age. She touched me in broad daylight, in front of everyone, but nobody said anything. No one told her to stop, no one told her it wasn’t her body. Nobody, again, protected me.

I was used to this, of course, but I was haunted by her actions. By the casualness with which she touched my breasts, my un-bra-ed ten-year-old breasts. There was also another layer of the violence—the girl was white. Not only did I understand that my voice next to hers would be negligible, I also understood, on some level, her whiteness would win. This is why racial imagination is so devastating, it becomes ubiquitous. Someone like me, with the life that had made me believe in my unworthiness, was doubly broken, because, on top of that, I had to unlearn whiteness and my position as a nonconforming Muslim Bangladeshi person. Even at a young age, I never bought into my body as a “female” body. To me, it was such a disgusting entity, one that quaked with desire and impulse and hunger. But that part of me, the oversexualized part, made me feel sinful and remorseful and confused by my own proclivities. I didn’t understand why Allah had made me this way—why was I made into such a wretched and horny beast? Back then, though my body’s template was so hard to understand, I knew I must be demonic. My mother always told me I was, and I had a body that continued to disappoint me.

Around seven to ten I was gaining weight very fast, eating any and all the junk food that I could get my hands on. Food became the comfort I didn’t have in my actual life, but the chubbier I got, the more my disdain for my body grew. I was terrified of being looked at but depressed when I wasn’t. I didn’t understand my sexuality either—I was crazy about boys but also fantasized about girls. The more I dwelled in this confusion, the harder it got for me to understand what was mine. The more I let others determine who I was for me, the harder it felt to ground myself in who I knew myself to be. I was also fighting my mother’s voice in my head, the one that would call me names and remark at my stupidity, insolence, and demonic qualities. I never understood what I was doing wrong, so I would go into the cycle of showing as little emotion as I could in front of her, especially when she was in a punishing mood, and I would just shut myself off, disassociate, and go into space, where I felt most safe. Where I could handle anything she threw at me with a hidden disdain.

It was around this time that I began to realize that my own masculinity might protect me, but this was also aided in a confusing distillation of how my body was read in the context of whiteness, a prop—yes, something to touch at will—but also an other, an unknown entity. “In my teens, I thought myself to be literally less perceptible than others,” Julietta Singh writes in No Archive Will Restore You. “I believed that my body was less detectable than those white figures everywhere around me.”^[1] It doesn’t always come down to some of us “wanting to be white,” it’s not as simple as that, because in that statement the context of white supremacy is evaded. For many of us, especially from South Asia, where colonization was executed differently and the impacts of partition have truly never been faced, a lot of us in the diaspora have been misinformed about who we are. I don’t know why culturally it’s more honorable to not speak of what ails you, but the more you do that generationally, the more disconnected you become from the whole truth, from the pain at the root, and thus the more unconscious you become. When you don’t know who you are as a person, you seek direction, emulation. Whiteness is a catch-all because it convinces you that if you participate in it then you, too, can have a good life, aka a white one.

It’s taken me a long time to understand the totality of the violence whiteness wreaks. White supremacy is a complicated beast with many arms, and that, in essence, is an important facet of why and how it’s propagated. The roots are deeply embedded in modern society. In my twenties, looking back at my past, I was judgmental of my choices as a child. As I’m prone to think I am always at fault, I assumed that I just wanted to be white, but really what I wanted—I now understand—was to be accepted, to be “normal” as it was sold to me. “Often, we don’t appreciate our bodies because we don’t feel them,” Selassie writes in You Belong. “We have ideas about the body, but we don’t feel them. We have ideas about the body, but we don’t actually sense our bodies. If we can’t sense the body, we can’t belong to it.”^[2] If you aren’t adjacent to what is read in the dominant society as power, then naturally you are isolated. This happens in so many ways—if you are disabled, if you are working class, if you were sexually abused, if you have a mental illness, and, of course, if you are not white. This festers a unique sense of isolation that Selassie articulates as a lack of belonging. Many of us, I imagine, feel as if we don’t belong in our own bodies, and thus the world at large. This formation is perhaps something we gathered from our childhood, and it might not even be something that’s ever articulated in your mind, and yet it’s an unsettling feeling of knowing that you are not accepted, and may never be accepted in your totality. This is what brews unworthiness.

“It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma, or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences,” Maté writes. “But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These personas suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.”^[3] When you forget, your mind might turn one part of your brain off, but it never really forgets, just how your body never does, either. Some of my literary idols spoke to the lovelessness or hardship of their childhoods—Susan Sontag, June Jordan, Audre Lorde. All of them died of cancer, all of them wrote extensively about grief.

The wildest thing I’ve learned about abuse is that it’s like an energy, a current that runs through you that you can pass down from generation to generation. It’s known as a cycle of abuse because it’s an energy that is recycled. The more I untether from my childhood, the more I can make sense of it, but it requires my full attention, actually looking at what’s there, and no longer denying what my conscious mind and my body know to be true. It takes true acknowledgment to heal. And then it takes action. Those two things, like Hermes wielding alchemy, are healing.

*  *  *

I had caught wind of my mother’s life from a young age, her life before us. My sister would tell me in whispers about the locked attic my mother was forced to live in for four years. That’s when I began to realize that there was something deeper there. From a young age, as her confidante and her keeper of secrets, I’d spend many nights lying by her side and massaging her body. It was generally the only touch she allowed from me—though my mother was a bully and believed she could touch me wherever she wanted, I was not allowed the same access. Nothing about that seemed odd to me, but the quick way she would react even to a hug, or affection, from me or my sister made me realize that there were many loose threads waiting to unravel, to be looked at. Because the power she exerted over us was through our silencing, we weren’t allowed to state the obvious or even ask questions. It’s as if the older we got, the more domineering she became. She could shut us down with episodic anger that was rapturous, but in smaller ways, too—by ransacking our rooms, listening in on every phone call, watching us like a hawk, beating us if we were home later than our expected arrival time. The more she revolted, the more I divorced from reality. In order to accept my life, we all had to keep the charade churning. We all took our parts in the play of my mother’s drama.

It took me years to understand that she and I did not have a normal relationship. Outside of the abuse she wielded on the three of us quite equally, there was something sinister in the way I was beckoned by her. I don’t think she was purposefully exploitative, I think we were both longing for some tenderness, and for many years I blamed myself for that, for wanting care, for participating in my abuse, for never saying no. For allowing myself to become hers, physically. To be owned by her. Possession is sexual and exploitative because it always requires someone’s submission. When I think back to a younger version of myself now, trying to understand how I just handed myself over, I am speechless. Yet this is also who I’ve always been, who I’ve always been forced to become: a girl at the behest of her mother, doing whatever I could for validation and concern. The saddest part is how this state of relationship—me as the forever captive forced to serve her captor—has bled into most of the intimate interpersonal relationships I’ve had.

The lines between responsibility and codependency often become blurred in abusive dynamics, as do the lines of balance that allow for both parties to have a say in any relationship. I seem to attract relationships where I serve people, endlessly. It’s what I think will bring me love. But within these dynamics the relationship always implodes the moment I stand up for myself after complying for too long. Because of my childhood, not only did I not know how to stand up for myself or understand it’s important to have your own boundaries, your own standards—I also didn’t know how to show anger. “The person who does not feel or express ‘negative’ emotion will be isolated even if surrounded by friends, because his real self is not seen. The sense of hopelessness follows from the chronic inability to be true to oneself on the deepest level. And hopelessness leads to helplessness, since nothing one can do is perceived as making any difference.”^[4] When you learn to accept unlovability, you also have to accept everything that comes with it.

However, almost like a blessing in disguise, the brutality of my life has been most revealed to me in the breakdown of some of my closest interpersonal relationships. I’ve started to accept that most people, even if they say they love you, will take advantage of you if you let them. I’ve seen people I thought loved me become entitled to me—especially in moments where I’ve finally enforced boundaries. It’s when I become the bad guy, the narcissist, the one who’s in the wrong. As Maté writes, “A pathologically enmeshed family system is characterized by a high degree of responsiveness and involvement. This can be seen in the interdependence of relationships, intrusions on personal boundaries, poorly differentiated perception of self and of other family members, and weak . . . boundaries.”^[5] It’s alarming how many of us perpetuate the family dynamics we learned as children, how many of us choose enmeshment as a proof of intimacy.

After three decades of dealing with my mother’s drama, I finally developed the nerve endings to ensure my safety when I see that energy coming my way now. These days, I want ease, I want softness, gentleness, care, and compassion. At the same time, the older I get, the more I know it’s necessary for me to be surrounded by people who get the full scope of what I’m working with, that they understand my past in order to get me, and hold me, at both my present and future.

*  *  *

We have to learn to have a better understanding and discourse when it comes to bodies, and understand how things impact us as well as what it means to understand what your body is telling you. “This may seem odd,” wrote Hans Selye, “you may feel that there is no conceivable relationship between the behavior of our cells, for instance in inflammation, and our conduct in everyday life. I do not agree.”^[6]

As a child, perhaps through signals from my mother, I began to understand that I couldn’t be my full self, so I had to hide and dim parts of who I was in order to be acceptable, and therefore safe, at home. Otherwise she’d hurt me, or berate me, and to save us both some time, I began to shut down parts of myself, only showing the side that was happy, neutral. As my body began to blossom, I was monitored even more closely. Any sense of sensuality or even sexuality was quashed because subliminally, my mother suggested everyone was out to rape me, including my father.

I existed in that fear for most of my life, a fear that my beauty would be used against me, so hiding was the best choice. But the irony is that Baby Fa—the small, child part of me who doesn’t care what her body looks like—she wants to be witnessed, she wants to be seen, she wants to come alive and play and be innocent and do all the things that she was never allowed to do and have a childhood. I have a lot of grief over being robbed of my early life, and so I have a lot of anger toward people who have had good childhoods. It’s a privilege, I’m not sure why we don’t understand this, especially when the difference between having a good childhood and not has dangerous long-term side effects. Maté articulates it perfectly: “Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with the chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can ‘understand.’”^[7] The way we downplay this reality results in a collective gaslighting. Despite the odds against us, children of neglect are forced to live normal lives. We are expected to get on with it. If we speak about our pain, we become burdens, or worse, victims who won’t shut up. But I’m speaking up for my kin, for the children like me. I’m making the connections and the conclusions because it’s time we face these things, too.

My body feels like it’s been thrown around for generations, though now it’s finally in my grasp. It’s important for me to express how I feel after being silent (and silenced) for so long. To be exotified, fetishized, since childhood is to lose yourself. By six, my mother would tell me to close my legs. “Who are you trying to impress?” she’d ask me. The disgust that I would feel for my tiny body was unimaginable, like she was pouring liquid poison down my spine. This was her favored choice of harassment, making lewd sexual jokes. Talking about our bodies like we had adult agency, forever blurring the lines between mother and captor. If I reacted poorly, she would accuse me of being dramatic, an evil child who was too sensitive. In fact, that was a regular attack on me, that I was too sensitive and emotional. Sometimes this would turn into a bad mood, which would turn into a days-long silencing battle, or of banging pots and pans, walking around the house enraged. Needless to say, the best way to move through her uncomfortable groping, touching, poking, prodding, or pinching was to go along with it. To nod your head and appease. But the more you did that, the more you handed yourself over to her.

There are so many layers I’m still uncovering. There’s so much that I barely understand about the things that have happened to me, but I do understand now that my questions about my gender were rooted in my fear that if I presented as being more femme that I would be faced with danger. On top of that, to neutralize my body in my father’s presence, so not to be raped, I became his son. I became a dutiful, intellectual son who spoke to him about politics and the perils of capitalism, and I, again, hid the other parts of myself. The sexual parts, the feminine parts. I always felt like a stranger inside of myself, and I grieve never being given the chance to be truly comfortable in my own skin, the chance to figure out my nonconformity on my own. I grieve having made choices out of fear.

In his fascination with classifying race, Bernier had a more sinister motivation and fascination, Stuurman writes: “By focusing on the aesthetics of the female body to the exclusion of all other criteria, the masculine, sexualized gaze naturally fits in with a discourse on race which posits physical, biologically determined differences in looks, colour and bodily shape as the ultimate foundation of a ‘new division of the earth.’”^[8] Stuurman goes on to explain that the fetishistic and upsetting ways in which Bernier speaks about women from Persia, Kashmir, and Circassia was claimed as objectivity, because men like Bernier, simply because of their whiteness, were seen as having verifiable opinions, merely detailing what they see, when what they could only ever see was the absence of what they were, they being the default and the litmus against everyone else.

The ways in which women’s bodies have been fetishized and weaponized is an endless journey of peril. We live in a fatphobic and ableist world that assesses beauty in a completely unrealistic sense, and yet it determines people’s livelihoods. I’ve spent too much of my life caring what people think about how I look and not enough time genuinely taking myself in. Because I’ve spent the majority of my adolescence to adulthood living with body dysmorphia and dysphoria, I spent so much time hating myself for that confusion, for not having any answers for why I felt the way I did, and for not feeling normal because of it. Up until my mid-twenties, I was afraid I was on the verge of losing my sanity, like my mother. Afraid that I’d wake up one morning having completely lost myself through the night, forgetting who I was entirely. Nothing was in my control or in my domain, and yet I survived. Humans are strange like that.

I was not raised to think my body was mine, but my mother’s first, my family’s second, my culture’s third, and my faith’s fourth; never mine. Sexual abuse at the hands of the same parent that surveils you creates a sense of forever fear; nowhere is safe. I had to travel thousands of miles from the site of the violence to experience some form of safety. I always felt hunted by her, possessed by her. This psychosexual explanation for the blurring of parent and child can be explained through the theory of enmeshment,^* a concept in psychology introduced by Salvador Minuchin to “describe families where personal boundaries are diffused, sub-systems undifferentiated, and over-concern for others leads to a loss of autonomous development,”^[9] which sometimes mimics a lost or absent spouse for the parent. This requires a certain codependency to continue, but these effects are devastating to the child. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Donna Haraway explains further, “We are not immediately present to ourselves,” a lasting legacy “especially true for survivors of trauma and for people who have generations of trauma history, such as the traumas of alcoholism, abuse, war, and colonization.”^[10] I used to think that trauma and abuse were all relative, but the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve begun to understand the real tenor of the violence of experience is exactly why I have felt so isolated in this world. Not everyone can meet me here, and not everyone wants to. I’ve gained language to understand the intricacies. When I talk about my life, I can instantly see who understands this, and there are very few who really get it. Those who do usually, also, have been betrayed by a parent. Generally, if you had a healthy relationship with your family, the different paradigms results in a lack of computing. It takes a similar action as a white person trying to understand race—it requires humility and an understanding that you might not get it, but that it’s not yours to get. When it comes to abuse, everyone is suddenly the judge, jury, and executioner. But the clearer I get about my own, the easier it gets to end relationships where my full dimensions are not considered, especially with regard to everything that I am. This means prioritizing the realities of what happened to me, even as I am trying to heal from them. I’m speaking to an uncomfortable truth, and I no longer wish to demean myself by lessening the pain for others and their comfort. I understand that my own testimony is what is most important, for myself.

*  *  *

A few days after the shooting at the Gold Spa in Atlanta, I went for a massage with my regular therapist. The night before I had finished watching Allen v. Farrow, the HBO series about Dylan Farrow’s abuse at the hands of Woody Allen. Throughout the four-part documentary, I was able to understand Dylan clearly because I was actively confronting similar realities in my own life and had made similar connections. The footage of Dylan speaking about breaking up with her boyfriend as a teenager, the way she held herself in her body, her trajectory from this open, bright child into an uncomfortable sad girl—and even more isolated adult—felt like my own. Much like witnessing James Safechuck be (not even necessarily speak, just watching his body language) reminded me so much of the hesitation that exists inside of me.

Feeling vulnerable, from life and the recent shootings, I was determined to get some relief from my regular massage therapist, whom I had been working with for years, and who was aware that my childhood sexual trauma was the root of so much of my chronic body pain. That day, halfway through my massage appointment, they started talking about the Farrow documentary that they had also been watching. Even though I felt an initial discomfort at the choice of the topic, I trusted this massage therapist and expected them to know my boundaries. That maybe ass naked on a massage table was not the place to hear about child sexual abuse. And yet, inevitably, despite my hope, the conversation moved in a direction I had not been prepared for, one where my massage therapist claimed that Dylan was lying. That, apparently, according to them, the whole thing was staged as a way for Mia Farrow to get back at Allen. Lying on my stomach, completely naked, I became enraged. I came to rest, to find safety. If not here, somewhere I pay to feel rested, where were survivors’ bodies actually safe?

I don’t think people who aren’t confronting their traumas fully understand how difficult the work is mentally as well as physically. The more you’re able to face it, the harder it becomes to ignore anything as your sensory capacity becomes more and more precise. As I lay there on the massage table, a few things ran through my mind: I was on my stomach, much like how Dylan was on her stomach when Allen molested her. How I was so many times proverbially and otherwise with my mother. Playing dead, playing dumb, thinking of the sound outside. Then, I thought of the women slaughtered by a white man with a “sex addiction,” and how Asian women’s bodies have been sexualized, fetishized, and exoticized throughout time. I thought about how many times my body has been compromised and how that was again happening, but in a different way. These days, the more I’m in my body, the more I react with it. So, as my massage therapist continued talking, I was able to locate the anger and express it. The session came to an end a little while later, but the damage had been done.

I cried all the way home on the train, grateful that I was wearing a face mask that helped hide my uncontrollable weeping. I wanted to scream. It felt like something had crawled up from underneath me and lit me on fire from the inside. When you have been abused and you know how to feel into it, this screaming void, you can feel all the souls with you that carry this pain, and the totality of it is almost too much to bear. As soon as I got home, I called my friend, also an incest survivor. She understood, she listened.

Women and femme bodies are extremely vulnerable in this world. But it’s important to note that many survivors, especially children, are also cis male and masc identified folks. There is no binary between who is abused, and by whom (the abusers are, in most cases, cis men, but, like in my own life, women and non-binary folks are also perpetrators of sexual violence and rape), so, these days, I’m unconcerned for those who cannot hold the multiplicity of experience within the realm of sexual abuse. There is no universal reaction by a survivor, and survivorship doesn’t look a specific way. We give such little space for the perspective of someone who has been apprehended at this level and allow others so much space to “debate” these intricacies on our behalf. But if we want to stop this kind of abuse from happening, a mass societal shift is needed. This is not within the spaces of science or law—this is an issue of power.

In her work, Megan Boler argues that a “pedagogy of discomfort” might be ethically imperative for us as a species. “Practicing and teaching our discomforts can become acts of learning to live with the ambiguities and uncertainties of our complex ethical entanglements,” writes Julietta Singh.^[11] Allowing conversations about discomfort helps us shape actual places of safety—by recognizing our physical and mental realities. Why are we so unwilling to hear out those who are speaking their truth? We silence the stories that threaten sexual hierarchies, as if women are only out to get men, when in fact society has been created to benefit men, and all the evidence is there, blasting like a song that won’t shut off. This exists even in what is seen as a privileged or prioritized body. In Fearing the Black Body, Sabrina Strings writes, “The phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.”^[12] Everything is also about power.

As we begin to crumble our psyche and the specific ways in which we regard our sensibilities, we must also look at what has shaped our view of our own bodies and others. Reflecting on the higher rates of hypertension in Black communities in the United States and autoimmune diseases and rheumatoid arthritis in South Africa, Maté writes, “the major factor would seem to be the psychological pressures of living in an environment where official racism directly and overtly deprived people of autonomy and dignity, while it uprooted people from their traditional family and social supports.”^[13] In a story about the Bedouins, Maté shares, “ulcerative colitis has been noted after settlement in Kuwait City, presumably as a consequence of urbanization . . . Explaining that the drive for ‘globalization’ has undermined the family structure ‘to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging.’”^[14]

Embodiment is political, especially when many of us have been systematically disembodied on multiple fronts. To find peace within chaos is an act of resistance, to accept the chaos, to move with it, to return home to a body that has never felt like yours requires so much patience that at times it almost feels easier to give up. So, you fall into the depths of that narrative again, that nobody understands or believes you, and that you are alone. Then, one day, you remember and are able to sit in stillness with your body, you arrive with a sigh of relief and sadness at how easy it is to forget yourself. Here’s a reminder that it’s an off and on journey. It’s not linear, but each day can be an act of becoming.

In Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism, my friend Amita Swadhin writes: “It’s hard to talk about pleasure when most of your life before leaving home at seventeen is a careful balancing act: hide the trauma, hide the truth, learn how to pass in the world as a ‘normal’ kid, a kid who isn’t being tortured at home.” It takes a lot “to learn there is a difference between hedonism that enables dissociation and disconnection versus joy and pleasure that enable presence and intimacy.”^[15] Sometimes one’s human journey feels and looks crunchy, sometimes it takes a lot of time to be “human,” but these days it becomes clearer to me that we just need to redefine what that means for us. And that we can do that societally, too. Clearly these labels and archetypes aren’t working. Inevitably, so much gets lost when we are determined by measures that weren’t written to house anyone’s differences.

It’s time for reinvention, it’s time for dynamic change. If the way humans engage with each other—and therefore our external bodies—is inherently prescribed by colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist divide (on top of the relations between sexuality, gender, and class), then this entire infrastructure needs a rebuild. Audre Lorde reminds us: “Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone, who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.”^[16]

*  *  *

Every day I’m starting again. That feels the most true for me these days, acknowledging that. Body dysmorphia is a complicated assignment. It shifts, like we shift, with the moon and the tides. Some days I’m happy, some days I can look at myself and see beauty. Many years ago, my trauma therapist asked me what I liked about my body. I stumbled on the question at the time, so she gave me an exercise to observe and be with my body. Many days, this work feels like engineering a connection where there was formally none, which is why I spoke to the mind first. Healing the mind is a very important component to healing the body, because in order to actually have lasting results, you have to work in tandem with both parts. There’s a larger metaphor here.

Today I take solace in the words of Adrienne Maree Brown: “I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was a miracle. I confess daily, ‘Here is where it hurts.’ I let the healing come through connection. When I feel like a failure, I look at my plants, at how they wilt and seem to be dying, and then water and sun and my loving words bring them back to vibrancy. I let water move over me, the sun change me, love reach me. I root down into the soil and back into my lineage, which reminds me that everything is temporary, but nothing disappears, this is how life is.”^[17] Surviving is a maelstrom, but there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. That’s gotta count for something, right? If coming back to myself, and finding love here, isn’t a miracle, then what is?

Footnotes

* Enmeshment is a theory within psychology whereby indistinct boundaries in familial relationships lead to the lack of independence and autonomy within a member’s development, typically a child.