grief, embodiment, and being in my body
Content Warnings: grief, loss
Most days days I wake up and look in the mirror and spend five minutes disassociating from my body. Anyone who knows me knows I sleep butt-naked, so when I tumble out of bed and come up to my full-length mirror, through groggy eyes I take in a mostly-human-form, and I fumble with my sense of personhood. I look at my nose and it’s not my own, I look at my ears and they’re not my own, I look at my stomach and almost throw up thinking about how I don’t really know what’s in there.
I’ve had embodiment issues for as long as I can remember. No, not “body issues,” because truth be told I have more confidence than I know what to do with, I believe myself to have a hot bod and a sick rack, and I have been straight-sized all my life. No, I very much mean embodiment issues. Where I have a hard time looking at my hands and remembering they’re attached to my arms. Where I get fidgety sitting still for too long and often imagine jumping out of my skin. Where many combinations of sound + sight + touch result in massive discomfort, irritability, anxiety, even nausea.
Now, to be fair, much of this is just general sensory processing issues and overload. It’s the reason airports and the city make me feel like my brain is melting (sound + sight). Or why my signature look throughout college was a pair of headphones blasting “celestial white noise” (sound). Or why I freak out if my boyfriend kisses my neck to loud (sound + touch). It’s a common struggle, with anywhere from 5–16% of school-aged children managing some kind of sensory processing disorder or another.
I could write a hundred posts about my own grief and grieving process(es) and have denied my writer self that opportunity on more than one occasion.
I say embodiment issues, not because I struggle with how my body looks, but more because I struggle with the simple fact that I have a body at all. These issues with embodiment have only compounded (like many of my other issues) after the loss of my mom.
I think about my own grief a lot. How it manifests, how it affects my personal relationships, how it impacts how think about my own future. And — in this particular moment of writing — how it affects how I live with-and-in my own body. I could write a hundred posts about my own grief and grieving process(es) and have denied my writer-self that opportunity on more than one occasion. (I’ve often thought about writing a series of posts or starting a podcast with title Grief B*tch or Got Grief? so maybe it’s time to tackle that dream…)
It is only very recently that I’ve shed some of the shame that comes with grieving, and the fear that comes with how my own grief process might affect somebody else’s. In the past year and a half, I have not only had to manage the mental/emotional results of loss, but the physical ones as well.
In my grief I have waged my own kind of war with my own body, processing physically with everything from getting tattoos to riding my bike, crying on public transit to drinking, even running for a couple weeks in the middle. This last one was especially short lived. It feels at times unfair that, in addition to handling my grief from that mental standpoint, I also have to deal with my grief as an entity that affects my physical body and sense of embodiment as well.
I started writing this post with the intention of composing a simple ode to my sensory overload. My body was freaking out at not being able to regulate my body temperature or move around while sitting on this airplane I waited five hours for, and I had hoped that typing and analyzing my own issues with my embodied self would make my current state of embodiment more bearable. Or that at least it would tire me out some.
I don’t know that that is how this post is ending, however; this feels more like a cathartic explanation of one of the many ways I struggle in my body and a blank-check apology for anything I might write about grief in the future.
I don’t know that I have anything new to say about grief that hasn’t already been said before in tones far more condescending mine, but I think I owe it to myself and others to de-stigmatize the effects of grief, in all their many-faceted glories. This post, for me, is an invitation to write. This post for some might be a small introduction into thinking about loss that they have not experienced, for others still it might describe the weirder parts of loss that are talked about less, but are still very real for you.
For even more others, this post might be a first flag that I might write some things that are not of interest to you. That’s cool; you don’t have to read every-/any-thing I write. :) I will do my best to content-warning posts that tackle these things with care and consideration, fully aware that my writing is not for everyone. But someone’s gotta write honestly about grief, y’all. And some days I think, well it might as well be me.
