Progress?

It feels premature to be writing about disassociating from my body. Not because it’s not something I’ve been consciously aware of and working on for years, but because I don’t have it worked out yet. For the most part, the spark that gets me to put pen to paper is some insight I’ve worked out. But every now and again I use writing to work some things out myself in a way that may or may not reach a conclusion by the end. It’s scary to me to write without a conclusion in mind.

The spark to write this time was the simple connection of my history with both disassociation and disordered eating. I have never been diagnosed with an eating disorder, although that’s probably only because I have never tried to be. There are a couple of things that have raised disordered eating to the forefront of my awareness these days. One has been my weight loss journey.

In anticipation of surgery, my doctor recommended I try to lose weight and referred me to a weight loss clinic. I now have the dubious honour of baffling both the doctor who specializes in weight loss and a dietitian. They have now both advised a patient (me) for the first time in their careers to increase food intake despite being referred to lose weight. They cannot explain why I’m not skin and bones but they expressed some deep concern and put me on medication for weight loss instead of tackling calorie counting and such. That medication has decreased my already-worryingly-low appetite further and I’ve found myself feeling proud on days when I get by on well below 1000 calories in a day and don’t even feel hungry. There’s a sort of detached recognition that ‘oh that’s not a healthy thought’ as I continue to revel in my “success.”

It seems obvious I should be re-evaluating my eating habits when I write it out like that.

The less obvious piece is that I have also been turning my attention to addressing the long-standing problem of disassociating from my body as part of the treatment of chronic pain. The problem with paying attention to my body it seems is that I then pay more attention to my body. And I am reminded of all the many reasons why I avoid doing that.

It’s not that I hate how I look, it’s that I hate how it feels.

My body has accumulated too many hurts and too many dysfunctions to feel like a safe haven.  One of those complex hurts is the sheer mountain of times eating has made me sick (thanks IBS). Safer to just not eat, according to my body. Ironically, listening to my body more has been making it more difficult to care for it. It seems I get stuck in my body the way others get stuck in their heads. It’s a pandora’s box that releases a swath of demons I had long ago buried in my bones.

Part of what I’m exploring in my attempt to feel my body more positively is to re-invigorate my sex life. That has not been going well. I won’t get into all of it here, but I will share that it’s become clear that I’m struggling to feel pleasure with touch the way I used to. The most success so far has been when I abandoned pleasure for embracing pain and discomfort.

Sex has become stressful for me. I generally need more foreplay than I used to, but that very foreplay can so easily turn sideways. Leaving me instead in too much pain, too tired, or too ticklish to continue. Or I’ve pulled back from my partner too forcefully in a knee-jerk reaction such that now we’re fighting instead of making love. It’s easier when I feel less pressure; when I’m less invested in the relationship. We’re fed this monogamist ideal that we should feel safest to explore everything with our spouse first and foremost. But at the moment that feels like being set up to fail. The closest relationships are by definition the ones I’m most invested in. And being so invested means I’m motivated not to fail. So, when freedom to fail becomes an essential ingredient to trying at all, it’s a stressful struggle to take care of the relationships closest to me.

How’s that for irony? Fear of failure leads to failure and freedom to fail leads to success. No wonder it hasn’t been going well.

They say disordered eating is about perfectionist control. In the past I’ve given myself an out by thinking that perfectionism must be targeted at looks or food to count as an eating disorder. As a more cerebral and less physical person of late, that was a convenient way to dismiss it as not applying to me. The recent struggles with sex highlight that my perfectionist tendencies are still alive and well and perhaps effecting my life more than I realize.

So. One step forward, two steps back? It certainly feels that way.

image obtained from https://www.drlizcarter.com/6-steps-to-making-you-a-priority-in-your-own-life/success-graph/ on Dec 29, 2021

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Not That Simple

It’s so bizarre to be thriving and struggling at the same time. I can’t even separate it out into categories like “my physical health is thriving and only my mental health is struggling” because it’s all mixed up.

I recently participated as a panellist on a talk about tai chi and pain. During the planning session for it, one of the other panellists suggested we cover mental health as well. I’ll admit that I didn’t react very well to the suggestion; I was starting to feel overwhelmed and like I was herding cats. We already had so much material to cover in an hour! What it’s like to live with pain, what people need to be aware of to create safe spaces, what kinds of pain there are, what tips and tricks we have to get the most out of tai chi while in pain, and how tai chi has helped us cope with pain and reduce our pain to a degree. And here was this late-to-the-party person strolling in expecting us to cover all the myriad of topics specific to mental health from a tai chi perspective too! I was very much not for it; surely that would be a whole other talk.

Fortunately, there were more level heads in the discussion who pointed out we were already covering that as we couldn’t separate it out if we tried. The mental state of someone in pain is too important to understanding them, helping them cope, and realizing what improvements can be made. A huge part of the benefits of tai chi for anyone is the improvements in mental health; of course we’re covering that!

It’s too easy to get stuck into binaries. Either something is physical or mental. Thriving or struggling. Mean or kind. And yet, time and time again life proves to me that there are few actual binaries in the world. In fact, I can’t actually think of any that I can’t just as readily think of exceptions for.

A few days ago I finished reading a graphic novel on queer theory called Queer A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele. I have long since been curious about queer theory, but – like feminist theory before it – I have found the topic inaccessible and too academic for my tastes. The graphic novel format combined with much effort on the authors’ parts has finally made the content digestible to me and it has been a revelation! Among the many insights that I will be mulling over for some time is what I consider the key point: binaries don’t serve us as well as we think they do.

For example, advocating for women’s rights can inadvertently perpetuate patriarchal views when the concept of womanhood is presented as a stable, universally applicable, and homogeneous identity.  There are many different kinds of women in the world and what makes us similar has more to do with what makes us human than why we identify as women.  Perhaps gender is not as useful of an identifier as I previously thought[1].

Like many, I have been personally offended by trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) rhetoric that has been popping up in online discussion and the media these past couple of years. I was around 19 when I was first told I likely won’t be able to have children and my menstrual cycle would continue to be debilitating and I’d better get used to it. Anyone who tries to tell me that the “joys” of menstruation and/or the ability to bear children is a defining characteristic of womanhood can go fuck themselves.  

I am no less of a woman for my inability to procreate. My dysfunctional reproductive system is not part of what makes me identify as a woman. To be clear, it’s perfectly okay for someone else to use those attributes to form their own identity. Just don’t you dare try to tell me what being a woman should mean to me; you do not speak for me. Like everyone, I am complex, contain multitudes, and changeable.

The times in my life where I have been most miserable are the brief periods where I didn’t allow myself the space to grow and change. Erroneously sticking to decisions I had made in the past as if I was the same person I was then, despite it clearly not working for me anymore. How on Earth can we have the hubris to think we can define womanhood for others when it means different things to ourselves over the course of our lives? Do other people truly experience stability of identity over time or are they just forcing it? Seems boring to me. Although, I appreciate the appeal of not going through an existential crisis every few years. Even if they are worth it.

And so: I strive to embrace the complexity instead. To get comfortable with discomfort. Right now, it seems like part of that complexity and discomfort is celebrating gains while simultaneously grieving my losses. The chronic pain that lost me my career is the best it’s ever been, while two older pains set the dominoes a-tumbling anew. Months of marital upset are finally making real progress, as I slide into depression once more.

One of the first things anyone hears when they get curious about polyamory is how much it pushes people to understand themselves better and grow into better versions of themselves. And the growth part is rarely smooth or pretty. I was warned.

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[1] Or perhaps I’m just returning to the same mindset that got me kicked out of ballet as a child. I refused to curtsy because the boys were allowed to bow and so I wanted to bow instead of curtsy too. I saw it not as a gendered activity – it wasn’t that I thought I was one of the boys – rather, I felt deep in my soul that we should be able to choose to bow or curtsy based on personal preference and not gender. I saw no reason why I should be forced to do something I didn’t want to do just because I was a girl. The teacher’s argument that it was about showing respect to her was invalid because I was willing to show respect with a bow. If it’s respectful for boys to bow, there’s no reason a girl couldn’t do the same. In retrospect, the teacher was right: ballet was not the right fit for me! They were not ready for me.

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