I try to avoid my body a lot of the time because I don’t like my body, and I also do not like the fact that I am a body. It’s not so much how I look, I think: what I don’t like is the fact of being physical, while also having to be in some way not physical as well. I find it unsettling to think that I am an object that can also have experiences. I remember when I was a teenager worrying that this might be true of objects they were not bodies, that weren’t alive, that if something like a chair was having experiences it wouldn’t have any way to tell you. People who aren’t autistic often criticise us for not being empathetic enough, but for me at least that was because I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone I empathised with a chair.
But then of course a chair doesn’t need to do anything to keep on being a chair. It doesn’t need to breathe or eat to be. Leave a chair alone in a sealed room for a year and when you come back it will still be there; leave me in the room and do the same and when you come back you’ll be going to prison. There was an extent to which being a body implied violence; like if you were going to keep on being a body this was something you’d have to be comfortable with. But then I never was, and still think I am not really, and so now I mostly forget I am a body at all. So much of what people don’t talk about seems to me a way of avoiding confronting all these terrible requirements of being a human in a giant complex society no human could understand, and like a lot of people I don’t talk to myself about everything that’s too hard for me. But all the same I try to feel more comfortable with being a body, and to get less about being in my mind all of the time.
It isn’t easy. I see it as hard to confront the fact that I am a pile of organs; that these disgusting baggy shapes are what contain everything I feel. And I think about how I am a pile of organs that doesn’t want itself to be a pile of organs, which is disgusted by the thought. And those organs are squirting chemicals and foaming bile at the possibility that they are just a pile of organs, the stomach is clenching in horror, imagining itself, here is the heart that would faint at the sight of its blood. Is it right to be disgusted by your own reflection, when it’s only the unfamiliar that gets reflected? My kidneys and my liver are screaming as much, but perhaps they’ve always just been in denial.
I guess being scared by the concept of probing is part of what I’m avoiding? Needing to keep a firm barrier between myself and the world, like my skin and the bones under it are something more rigid than what they are? I remember my friend said I was afraid of the idea of being a part of nature, and I think she was probably right, but she was right because I was afraid of the absence of walls, of shells. The beak that snaps through the sheltering shell of a snail is part of nature, and unfortunately for them the snail is too. But I could sympathise with the snail if it thought – in its dying moments – that it would have been better if they could have managed to avoid that fact. But then of course there are parts of myself that are on the other side of those walls, sometimes the walls are built around the whole body, inwards and inwards to the inner place where I am, that place I know that western thought can cling to which the science of every direction would say hasn’t ever been there. No matter. These aren’t the first walls to protect an empire that doesn’t exist. It’s always the fear that drives them, of discovery as well as invasion.
And maybe there’s no distinction between an unwelcome thought and unwelcome touch, or at least maybe there’s a part of my mind that isn’t able to make it. Maybe my fear about being a body is the same as the fear that drew me deeply inside it, trying to withdraw further and further until I am not connected to the world at all. It’s like trying to be a black hole, I suppose, to collapse so deeply internally, so much so that nothing can get outside or in. It’s tempting, but of course it is an illusion as well: thoughts and things can easily break inside that world for myself I have created. I know in my mind that the only solution is to be more comfortable with my body. But always I find that internally it’s my body that’s mounting the resistance. It isn’t comfortable with me getting comfortable with it. It refuses. It sits there unwelcoming like a guarded dog, a suspicious creature that doesn’t want much to do with me. And I can sympathise with that, to some extent. It’s just that I know that neither of us get a choice.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 