I’ve been trying for a while to tune into this body of mine.
The problem is trying. Trying is a lot like shoulding.
Take my years-long quest for the right glasses prescription. Things still seem blurry some of the time. Or do they? I can’t really be sure. I go to the optometrist. We do the eye chart thing. She confirms I have the right prescription. But by this point I’m overthinking my vision. Everything looks bizarre. This can’t be what the world looks like, can it?
It makes me realize I’m not seeing things as they are. I never have, never can. All I can do is manipulate these organs and muscles into helping me gather enough information to stay alive, the legacy of millions of years of ancestors who developed many cells and crawled out of the sea. The picture is not perfectly crisp, even at 20/20, but it’s good enough to spot mold on the bread before I eat it and to admire a sunset.
These muscles in my face, the eyes that are the MVPs of my nervous system: they’re my only way of being here. I’m in this meat suit. I am this meat suit. But being really present in this meat suit isn’t so easy. It requires turning down the noise on everything else. And everything else loves to be noisy as hell.
To my surprise, the voice of my body is really quiet. It doesn’t withstand overthinking. Like the little voice the other day that told me to go for a walk instead of writing. I began to second-guess it, negotiate with it. It shrugged. I walked.
Listening hard enough to hear this tiny voice is such a mind shift. An example: I’m still coming to realize that nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants especially) tend to make me feel pretty bad. Years of dieting and control will numb you into inattention, because that way of life is all in the numbers. “Health” is all about metrics, which a computer or a book or a trainer can instruct you on. A potato or a tomato becomes a number of calories, or of carbohydrate grams, or it is on or off of a list of approved foods. That’s a quick way to forget how to listen into the meat suit. Do you actually like potatoes? Do they like you? How would you know?
Ironically, a lot of us begin trying to control our bodies because something dissociates us from them in the first place, whether it be the normal dose of nonsense the culture feeds us, or actual childhood trauma. We become dissociated from our bodies’ needs because these events make it advantageous to look outside not inside. Then, because we are dissociated from our bodies’ needs, we “overeat” and can’t tell what we actually need. Then we are “obese.” Then we ask someone outside us to tell us how to stop being fat. We perpetuate, rather than solve, the problem—which is to tune into what the body needs.
