CHAPTER ONE

Part Two

In many ways... this work is a story of my body and brain truly meeting.

Getting to know one another.

Trusting each other. Forgiving each other.

Bodymind hits me so big because its theoretical base is the way I have come to... the way I have chosen to look at and live within the world and my life. Yet I have never applied it to me as a life. Or maybe more specifically... I have never seen my body as a subjective living, blameless, writhing organism. Medical gazes don't allow for ideas of affective reciprocity within cellular mutual affects.

Seeing my body through bodymind is looking at myself through care.

I am not seeing to dominate, locate, isolate and control.

To tame.

Oh my god writing this makes me so deeply sad.

I was taming my body.

I was taming my bodymind through extension.

Now... I am just seeing and listening.

Mutual affects and mutual respect.

I think when I was originally looking for words of experiential wisdom of how to navigate disability, never ending illness and sickness, I was looking to "reimagine" disability and never ending illness and sickness... but I don't want to anymore.

No more taming.

Not even soft taming under any other names for tame.

I want to be here and to be real with illness and to reimagine the world that is around my illness.

I want to live in my bodymind and live in my energy and be intuitive from within it.

Bodymind becomes a place of access.

A door.

A window.

An explosion.

I join my bodymind for the first time since I was a kid.

My newly ruptured instinct is to centre myself... my bodymind in the world.

Me and my bed and the dark.

The small room we rest in.

The house the small room is in.

It is an act of self-defence.   

If I picture it... I see this very small, tiny almost unseeable dot in the middle of the big moving visible world.

It doesn't matter to the rest of the world that I have decentred it... but it matters to me.

I am conceptually, theoretically, politically and physically uncomfortable thinking with the term "centre" or moving toward a power of a centre.

An imposed damaging tradition of the centre.

Hierarchical, fixed structures.

Linear movements and stillness.

I have an affinity and belief with decentering. 

I think through neurodivergent shapes and asymmetrical connections.

My queerness, all queerness, exists at the edge of the centre.

I live and defend rhizomatic growths and shifts.

I am against traditional structures of power.

The forced systems of destructive colonial, Western patriarchal self-centering.

And so my cheeks flush red with theoretical and philosophical contradiction and cultural shame when I think I am centering... moving towards the idea of a centre.

And then I centre my bodymind in this embarrassment and I stay still.

I stay still in this feeling.

I stay with bodymind in the centre.

My bodymind opens me up to feeling-thinking complexity... and it feels nerve endingly sensitive all of the time.

It would be and has been so much easier to turn it off.

But I don't.

And I won't.

I once would have stewed in and performed this embarrassment.

Shame is a fertile device of the "good" body.

I stay.  

I put my bodymind in the middle of everything.

I critically occupy the centre through care.

A centering that is a decentering.

A centering that is a centering of the middles of the outsides.

A decentering of the medical, social and cultural narratives of my sick bodymind. 

A decentering of the ancestral markings of the medical model on my family.

Especially the patriarchal imposition of this model's generational retelling.

And a decentering... exploding of my own internalised ableist voice.

I make a commitment.

To meet myself where I am.

To stay honest to my experiences.

To stay honest to my bodymind.

This centering is also an apology.

My bodymind doesn't know me as anything other than a controlling force that overrides and distorts its nature. That judges and pushes and never accepts it as it is. This is a centering as action to gain trust. To be forgiven.

There is no longer a structured internalised force causing body and mind fragmentation. Centering bodymind dissolves single unconnected directions.

And the boundaries of the fragments of me... now around me... swell and froth with propagating porosity.

Decay and growth look the same at their beginnings.

All ooze and loose and uncontrolled.

The hidden, invisible, shown, visible and sacrificed discrete sections of me are disintegrating.

I feel like I have hovered over and around these thresholds all of my life.

And now I can feel them bleeding out.​

When I was in my early teens... I would let the ink from my pen soak into my bedsheets. There was something soothing about the slowly expanding black and red and blue stains in absorbent motion.

And at some point it looked more like the cotton was taking the ink more than the ink was giving its colour.

Like a cigarette burning holes in paper and drops of hot coffee on a sugar cube.

This feels like that.

When the spilling and the swelling and the heat are also erosion and disappearance and ash.

It feels like that.

Parts of me are breaking down.

A whole being born from that breaking down.

Interdependent. Interconnected. Complex. Relational. Boundaryless bodymind.

Centred.

Centred.

Centre.

What is most in this centre with me right now?

Illness.

Sick.

Invisible illness and sick.

This shifting... this letting go... this self-defense is happening at the same time I am in the process of another diagnosis.

I don't know this yet though.

I have had to quit my job.

I have been in bed and homebound for three months.

I am terrified. I am angry. I am bone marrow tired.

Sometimes I can't remember words or speak properly.

Sometimes I can't stand up.

Sometimes I can't properly hold stair rails or bath towels.

I can no longer hold conversations.

I can't be in the light.

I can't listen to too much sound.

I can't shower... and when I do my husband dries my hair.

I am becoming invisible from my life. 

I feel pickled with invisible illnesses. 

One day I think... if I am a bodymind with invisible disabilities am I  an invisible bodymind?

And when I imagine the term Invisible Bodymind in my head I feel a connection to my experience as conscious biology for the first time.

I was never able to access any sense of embodiment until I knew this term.

Though... right now I still don't know what it fully means.

Only that it is resonating at a place within me that wants to talk with me.

Invisible bodymind.

I want to do more to make sure I stay honest in every moment.

I feel I need to be as explicit with myself and my experiences of self as I can be.

I am learning this all for the very first time.

I centre my invisible bodymind.

And now that I am exploring in the space of embodiment I change this term to embodimindment.

Why only use a part of the term for all this experience.

Just like the combination of body and mind into bodymind, "it makes sense to put them together" (Price, 2015).

 I explore bodymind as embodimindment.

I want to explore my invisible  embodimindment.

When I say "I", I am saying invisible bodymind.

It helps me to stay honest and safe as a newly dissolved, interdependent, interconnected, complex, relational boundaryless invisible bodymind.

Centred.