I’ve just finished reading On Bodies, an anthology from Three of Cups Press. Like everyone else, I am a body, so there was lots in this book I found affirming and relatable. And at the same time I also found it to be very sad, because all the bodies who wrote it seem to hate being bodies at all.
I can understand that, because I hate being a body even when I am cis, male and relatively free of ongoing conditions, but it turns out there are all sorts of horrible things about being a human body that I didn’t even know about! Stephanie Boland’s essay on the ovary pain she’s in lots of the time made me want to personally apologise for not having any ovaries myself. Michael Amherst’s story of living with Epstein-Barr Virus is an insight into what it’s like to have a condition I barely knew about. And there are stories from people who society has decided are too hairy or have breasts that are too large; who are deemed too masculine; too feminine; too not the sort of body that people expect. It’s all horrible, and exhausting. Bodies feel like an awful idea.
Although most of the essays in this book are about feeling too aware of the fact that you are a body, the one I related to most was Ari Potter’s, which is about feeling totally disconnected from it. Staring blankly at your skin and thinking about how fragile it is; deciding literally *being* a big sack of bones is ridiculous and refusing to accept it. There’s this awful paradox throughout this whole book where being seen as only a body denies a person of any humanity, but being seen as something apart from their body denies them of the compassion they deserve. Where the body is something you want to escape, but is also something you are. It made me feel it was important to be kinder to people in general: more considerate, better. Because being a person means you also have to be a body, and being a body is really very hard.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 