18.03.2025, 12:23 - new note
The more often you’re sick, I think the more you start to separate yourself from your body. You learn: What I want and what my body wants are two separate things. What my body does isn’t a reflection of me. If it’s mental illness, we might take it a step further, even - I am not my brain. My brain wants this or that, but I don’t. My brain forces me to do this and that, even though I know it’s pointless.
It makes sense in a world where what we recognize as a bad pattern doesn’t necessarily motivate us to break it, or even give us the means to. In a world so out of control, it’s also us who is out of control by extension. Our bodies and brains are out of control, it seems. It gives way to feeling like our own self works against us, so we separate it. It’s not our fault, after all.
If we do that, we are now floating, detached, in this meatsuit. It’s hard to get by otherwise when the first rules you learned in this world have been broken - that your body is you and tries to protect you and keeps you alive. How do you go on then, when your body or brain tries to kill you or does a bad job in keeping you alive? How do you regain trust?
Sure, a lot of it might be an overreaction, trying to keep you too safe - but the result is the same.
It’s difficult to keep up a sense of connection and compassion with something that has seemingly not held up its end of the contract. We’re banging against the wall of this prison, we’re growing within it and against it, we stretch it all over our skin. There’s bruises and wounds where what we want and what our bodies can deliver chafe.
After being let down, who do you trust? It’s weird, because while separating yourself from your body, the effects of trust remain the same - you cannot trust yourself. Because where you go, there you are, there your body is. The body that can mess everything up. The body that has turned spikes inward, where you are, and moving in it makes you brush against them.
You cannot will yourself into power, into health. You have to submit. You have to respect its boundaries and its limited time. There is only so much you can fight. Your body will return any mistake and malice tenfold. There’s nothing it won’t get revenge on, even when it’s delayed.
It means there is always this gap, this what-could-have-been if your body cooperated. I wonder if with age, everyone experiences this, this let-down, this body becoming too small, the spikes. And what is illness to a supposedly ‘gifted child’, if not a small death sentence?
Even if you separate yourself further and further as someone wronged by nature, put into a failing vessel, for the outside it’s just the same. It’s how people recognize you and measure you; it measures your competence, your attractiveness, how much you deserve. It can generate hate, pity, envy and much more.
You have to let go of the notion that one day, everyone will see. That everyone will see you for the true, unhindered, logical, healthy, productive you. That they could somehow look past the limits of your body and brain and believe you when you say you would, if you could. They can only look on from the outside and see the amalgamation of your body, your brain, your soul, into you. It is all you. The parts you hate, you.
If you have no one in the world to trust, at least you can trust your body… usually. But what if you can’t trust your body to beat its heart, to breathe, to digest, to move? What if then, you have to relocate this trust outside of you - to your caretaker, your support network, your doctors, the pharmaceutical companies and scientists? You cannot control any of them.
But you try to build and build and build. You let it in. Whatever treatment makes it easier to trust again, to reintegrate yourself with your body. You have an anchor there again, the spikes are gone or not noticeable. Things become manageable again, under your control. The stick shift, the brake and gas work again. But for how long? And is a body that has to be bribed, subdued and wrestled with to cooperate trustworthy? What if the body raises its price, becomes stronger? What if someone takes away the ropes?
There is grief about everything you will never manage, all the missed opportunities, the failed plans and the limits yet to come. Grief about bad doctors and bad unwelcome advice. Grief about wasting your limited time with this. Grief about not finding out sooner.
Grief about being the sick one, and by extension, an unreliable one, a weak one, possibly an undesirable one, depending what it is. The one that is more likely to cancel, to miss out, to complain, who fills the air with uncomfortable and sad news. The one that reminds you of things you’d rather not think about. The one some people think brought it on to themself, whether it be food and drink or vaccines or antibiotics or living in a city or being queer or whatever. The one people look at and go “They would be prettier if they were thicker/thinner/putting more effort into how they dress, and would be less weird.” The one people look at and think “What a shame.”
I’ve refused to be that, but for how long can I keep it up? The wolves are ripping at my guts again, the sirens up top are on, and my future is in a fog once more.