I have lived for years in awful, ugly houses where nothing worked and the very structure seemed sometimes to want to cause me harm. And I wasn’t bothered. So how am I so constantly and profoundly uncomfortable in this perfectly serviceable body I inhabit?
I remember the first time I realised that my body was becoming less my own. I was thirteen and taking a shortcut through a public park in the middle of the day. It was the first year I had breasts and I was painfully aware of them. A boy – maybe seventeen, maybe older – was walking past me, and he veered off track for a couple of seconds to faux-casually bump into me while he put one hand up and squeezed my breast. Hard enough to hurt. I could still feel the impression of his fingers in my flesh after he walked away.
I kept walking. I was scared, mostly, and I didn’t want him to come back. But somewhere in the back of my mind I had an inkling that this was new, and this would mean something. I think it was a marker – of the beginning of a period where my body would take on a presence and meaning that transcended my own identity and then kind of stood apart from it. I think for women this is a period that lasts from the onset of puberty until whatever age we deem female humans to be no longer sexual – their fifties, maybe? Younger? But anyway, that was my own initiation and it was awful.
It was an initiation into a state of being that women are thrust into where your body becomes public property. If people approve of it then it’s not yours – it’s theirs to discuss, admire, touch, grab, whatever. And so there comes the hand slipped up a skirt on the stairs in a nightclub, the disgust, the fear. Being pinched or stroked or rubbed up against on crowded trains. Having the word ‘slut’ yelled out car windows at you so depressingly often – whether you’re wearing a short skirt at three o’clock in the morning or a baggy tshirt, jogging, in the late afternoon. And your body is just as much other people’s when they don’t approve of it. Then they’ve got the right to talk about it like it’s a haircut you got. Telling you it’s too fat or you shouldn’t wear that, wear this instead. Letting you know whether or not they’d tap that, like your body wasn’t attached to an actual person.
And that’s one of the most pervasive, most quietly depressing things, I think. People letting you know whether or not they’d want to see your body naked, as if their approval matters. Oh, the bestowal of the favour of someone else’s desire! Offered like a gift. Like you should be so grateful. And the saddest things is that when it’s been withheld and withheld and you’ve been judged and found wanting again and again as your body grows and you learn to wear your new flesh, it gets to the point where you really are grateful when you’re wanted. Not all of you wanted, just your body. And you’re grateful and it’s sickening.
And after all that is pushed through, after you get older and stronger and think you’ve finally scraped off the slime of caring about that approval and learned to say ‘fuck you’ to it all, you turn on yourself. Or maybe you do that first, or during. For me, it was after, though. I was so angry at my own body for just being there, for being so visible, so concrete, when I wanted to be invisible, that I put it through hell. I tried to make it hurt, and I tried to make it disappear. I didn’t feed it. I made it run and run until it hurt all over. I shrank down all small, all of a sudden. And my face was drawn and my eyes were grey and it was all I could do to crawl out of bed in the morning. My poor hungry brain was all in a pickle. I would cry rivers, out of sight, then wipe my face off and walk out with a glass of wine to chat and sparkle and all that time I hoped someone would see how brittle I was and how empty the underneath had become, but it never happened.
So I went away. Angry, hungry, tired, I ran off to a tropical island where I ate until it hurt, and my body puffed up again, bigger than ever. I drank even more, and had awful joyless sex with anyone who looked at me sideways. And I guess after that I just distracted myself through the worst of it. I fell in love and even though he wasn’t much kinder to me than I was to myself, he at least bullied me into intellectualising my feelings rather than wallowing in them.
And I’ve never slipped down that far since, even if I did develop a slightly troubling ability to detach from my own feelings that I’ve never managed to quite switch off. But at least I know I’m finally stronger than my internal weather, and I’m just a tiny bit stronger than that old sick feeling of looking in the mirror and barely recognising my face, my limbs, my skin. Barely recognising my own self and hating it all at the same time. That feeling is quieting down, and in the quiet I’m left with a numbness as I regard myself. It’s like meeting a stranger you’ve been hearing awful things about for years, and trying to work out the truth of them behind all that noise.
I still am baffled by my body, even now I’m not full of hate for it any more. Most of the time I feel no particular shame in it, because I still have trouble remembering that it’s mine; that it’s me. I still have moments of squeamishness, of wishing it could be less real and more like a doll’s plastic skin that never changes, never wants anything. I am embodied, I always have been and we always are, I’ve just always fought it and now I don’t know how to stop fighting.
I just want to be comfortable in this silly old house that’s never, ever let me down. I want to be thankful for it. I want to admire it and be able to understand admiration from outside. I want to know what it’s like to be joyously physical and proud and grounded and in love with every steady breath.
One year at a time, I suppose.
Rose Bishop 