CHAPTER ONE
Part One
I never thought I'd write about my body
Early 2021.
I don't know how to start this.
I'll start in the body.
Where this begins.
I never thought I'd write about my body. I always chose my mind over my body. Embodiment... when you do not trust your body or like your body and the experiences it affords you, denies you, complicates for you in the world... it feels like holding your breath. Your entire body is a mouth and it is holding its breath. How long can you hold your breath? I can hold mine for two or three hours. For days. For weeks. For fifteen years. For twenty. I always chose my mind over my body with ease. Eventually without noticing anymore. Bypassing my body has allowed me to exploit what I can of a body and to get more out of almost zero. Repurposing biological functions throughout the day and night like refracted, weakening light. Reflecting off strategically positioned polished bronze in pyramids to reach down into the darkest chamber. I have caused disconnection and distrust. I have caused so much damage. And so this begins in a body that doesn't feel safe with me. I think that the last four years have been about trying to make my body feel safe with me again.
When this work... project... research is beginning... I am fragmented.
I am scattered.
Hard-edged, closed, limited, disjointed, disconnected, unquestioned, unembraced silo parts that make me up.
Brain: hidden
Brain: invisible
Brain: shown
Brain: visible
Brain: sacrificed
Mind: hidden
Mind: invisible
Mind: shown
Mind: visible
Mind: sacrificed
Body: hidden
Body: invisible
Body: shown
Body: visible
Body: sacrificed
Creativity: hidden
Creativity: invisible
Creativity: shown
Creativity: visible
Creativity: sacrificed
And what is centred is not my lived experience.
Never my lived experience.
What is centred are the narratives of modern, liberated, progressive people involving only the "good" body.
The "well" and visible body.
In "Sick Women Theory", Johanna Hedva contextualises the modern development of an ingrained "well" body this way: "Sickness as we speak of it today, is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite "wellness". The "well" person is a person well enough to go to work. The "sick" person is the one who can't" (2016, p.6). I have centred an implicit, conditioned, visible "well" body that has to be able to surface all ambition, desire, forward growth, independence and agency and drive and success and love and control. Any and all and the majority parts of me that are not the visible "well" body, are decentred. Conditioning comes with conditioned direction; all towards me. At me. I receive them before I receive myself. I perceive through the idea of the "good" body before I perceive myself. I perceive, project, the "good" body onto myself.
Disability researcher Arseli Dokumacı, calls this implicit enacting the "Habitus of Ableism". She speaks about it as the imposed conditions the people in her book, people who live with disability, live inside of: "[...] an unknowingly incorporated set of bodily dispositions and skills and, necessarily, their affordances that have become established as a way of moving, sensing, and behaving in the world, negating all other alternatives" (2023, p.20) . I recognise myself in this description... although I am the one negating all other alternatives. I have been living my life with internalised ableism at its core. A core that radiates hidden, implicit scripts of the "good" body and of the "good" brain. I have been performing wellness. Anything that doesn't help me in creating this performance is kept hidden. This is my second relationship with the invisible. I make large parts of my body and my mind invisible. My second invisible is because of me.
This was my body and mind as bodymind found it.
I had swallowed the "good" and the "well" body.
It had swallowed me.
This whole project is me coughing it back up and back out.
When I first read the word "bodymind", I don't think anything of it.
It is not my experience of being alive... and so I glance over it assuming it is a holistic approach to grappling with a disconnected body and mind. A kind of mindfulness methodology for us broken up people whose sickness and disability can become so much for so long we separate.
Dissociate.
Consciously and unconsciously.
I am conscious that at some point I have consciously and unconsciously come to live very separately in myself.
It is how I function.
It is how I survive.
It is how I manage... and it is not up for being challenged and changed.
When I start exploring peoples' disability experiences I am looking for community.
I am looking for how to navigate, function, survive, manage. I rush to be held by this world and I am constantly seeing this word "bodymind".
Bodymind.
Bodymind.
So I finally look it up properly.
My favourite definition which I have carried with me like a small suitcase for four years is:
"[...] the intertwinement of the mental and the physical [...] because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other - that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two - it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term" ( 2015, p.268).
The first breath my body took in decades was more of a sharp intake of air. More of a hit to the stomach. Because to me, for me, this is a radical way of thinking of the body. The mind, which I have dedicated so much learning and knowings about, my own and everyone else's as I could, I know this about. Acknowledging the relational and interconnected affects and the effects of the mind and the brain and the mind and the brain and the world are how I move through my life.
Ecology has become an imp, an epi [laughs]. Ecology has become an epistemology for me. From every scale of the physical to the metaphysical. The large to the small. Explicit to implicit. Dynamic, flux, interconnected, interdependent and relational is how I view and look at systems and processes. At anything living and within the living and that comes from the living. But I have never treated my body this way. My body is subservient to my mind and I have only looked at it through the medical paradigms it is been looked at through. I learn about my body through doctors and specialists. The medical gaze internalised as a way to live. I know about my body through complex symptoms not as part of a complex system. A complex system in itself, yes. My body is a series of invisible syndromes, symptoms, causes and causalities. I am physiological dissonance. "Interconnected" and "relational" I have only ever thought of through pathology and treatment when it comes to my body.
Since I was twelve, I was guided and instructed to look at my body and my brain and their "dysfunctions" as something that can be controlled if I understood their effects well enough.
Watch for them.
Locate them.
Isolate them.
Control them.
Repeat every day for the rest of your life.
I have used these instructions as a means of how to construct an assemblage of the "good" visible body.
Until now.
Until right now. At this very moment... the definition of bodymind completely ruptures how I have been living my life.
Before the rupture my first instinct and action would be to hide the rupture.
Understand and control the rupture.
Fix the rupture.
Instead... I have spent every day since exploring it.
Resting in it.
Listening to it.