On the body knowing, on loving it

 

The idea that the body knows what it needs — to heal, to return, to self-regulate — reigns in my mind, but some days it feels like it's becoming less and less true. 

It feels like I've been sick for months and months on end. I'll heal and then get sick again a few weeks later. I've been getting fucking wrecked, honestly. 

When I was in the hospital for my cyst rupture, the imaging showed that I have another one growing: 2.5cm on my right ovary, emitting random hormones that my body doesn't know what to do with. I've been breaking out hormonally, I gained a little weight, there's lots of water retention in my face, and I've started a few of the other typical PCOS symptoms. I do not know how this might affect my fertility. It all feels so defeating when I dwell on it.

Some days I believe the thing about the body knowing, that it works diligently and actively in ways I don't understand, can't see, can't ask it about. I think where I’m landing most nights is that it’s best to actively practice love toward my body — neither to treat it neutrally, nor to shame it. 

Earlier this year I took a bath for the first time since I was 19 or so. The way I even got into the tub was kind of funny: I came home from something very late at night, and I felt sickness coming on — eyes hot, body aching, weak. I stood at the corner of my island for what felt like several minutes contemplating what I would do if I had a boyfriend or a friend over and they felt the way I felt inside. I watched this alternate version of myself spring into action; she drew a bath, turned down the lights, and put on music. She cut fruit. She boiled water for tea. She enjoyed doing something nice for them. 

So I did all of that shit for myself. I made noodles and drank tea and cut oranges and had them all in the bath and drew up little islands of bubbles to cover the surface of the water. It felt strange to do this very loving thing for this body, my body.

I was mostly just shocked at how easy it was to do once I pretended I (the giver) was different from myself (the recipient), and I was surprised about how it felt to receive. It did feel good being on the accepting end of care, even when the person who generated it was me, and not someone else.

It occurred to me then that showing my body love can be a pretty straightforward thing. Self-love had always sounded like a waste of time, a sort of inwardly slouched affection for myself, a weird term for an elusive state of mushy spiritual unlock that you achieve by somehow inducing yourself to fall in love with you. Those definitions don't interest me — I feel more comfortable with the idea that loving yourself might simply be a thing you do or don't. It's a verb. It's a practice. It's not a feeling or an attitude or a state of enlightenment.

I find it useful to think about building consistency in serving my body or my heart/mind, then executing each act of service as consciously, meticulously, and faithfully as I would if I were serving [insert person here]. It’s easy to fall out of this thinking, but the easiest way back in is to start by pretending that my receiving self is my friend — she just happens to look a lot like me. 

I’ll even address her differently in my mind — stand to the side of her, examine her situation from a few feet away, and speak with compassion and acceptance. If she's feeling shitty from a lack of sleep, I can withhold judgments or assumptions about the reasons why she stayed up so late. I can ask her questions about how she's feeling and why she might be skipping out on sleep, and I can more easily get to answers when the primary feeling she's feeling isn't self-judgment. I can ask her what she needs, and if what she really wants is a bath, even if she doesn't feel like she deserves it. (I would never consider whether my friend deserves a bath; I'd just tell her to get into it.) After enough time, I've found that I've stopped pretending to be my own friend. I am. 

Anyway, anyway. The biggest discovery for me here is probably that I don’t need to rely on affection or draw on emotional love for myself to show love to my body. Even in times of exhaustion or even self-loathing, I can just decide to.