December 26, 2021 ~ For Olivia
I’ve eased up on myself as 2021 comes to a close. I started reading your latest book, Everybody, a few days ago and flying my way through it. As a matter of fact, I’ve started my mornings by digging in. There are so many gems, I don’t really know where to start, actually. As I write this missive to you, I’m listening to a conversation you had with Maggie Nelson earlier this year. I started reading your book because my chronic pain has increased over time and your thesis for the book about the body being both a vessel for imprisonment and liberation is such a provocative idea. To show that this binary can exist within a human body based on the traumas and treatments, it has got me thinking of so many things I’ve been thinking about happening within my own body.
I’m really not sure how to describe how I feel to my therapist and primary physician. Admittedly, and I’ve written about this, I find myself wanting to switch doctors or find a doctor that can help me get the answers I need to address what happens when I’m in pain and even feeling growths in my body that scare and cause me anxiety despite being told not to worry. You also include historical touch points with well known artists and writers and the relationships with their bodies is crucial. Kathy Acker. Susan Sontag. Ana Mendieta. William Reich. Every morning, you have me thinking about all the things that live inside my body through these stories.
At this moment in the conversation, you’re talking with Nelson about how these stories and narratives are housed in the body and manifest out into art. I must be thinking so much about embodiment because I’ve also been listening to Lily Kay Ross’s stories about the psychedelic community. Slowly but surely trying to think of different treatment programs that can help me heal further. Grad school has not been kind to my body. I wake up in pain all the time and I want to be well. I want to be fit (not for vanity reasons, but because I just want to live). Reading your book makes me want to write about women and femmes within Filipino culture how how trauma infiltrates and changes the body under colonialism. I guess this is why I love Alok Vaid-Menon’s work so much because they remind me that gender is fluid and whatever way we want to express ourselves should not be defined and dictated by our bodies or lineages. You mention Hirshfield’s work in sexuality and how gender is boundless, actually. But the world we live in is so unrelenting in its cruelty. Well, because I have trouble sleeping and suffer from insomnia, I take edibles and it is kicking in the evening.
On the digital thread of the time-space continuum, here is a post from December 26, 2011.
