The Body is Hard Place to Be

(But maybe it's really not.)

The body is a hard place to be because it doesn’t lie. Our bodies only know the truth. When we are divorced from our bodies, from what’s true and real about and for us, suffering occurs.

The body is a hard place to be because we are fallible, vulnerable humans. We are an open system—biological and electrical wonders. We affect each other; we give off energetic and magnetic fields to attract or repel each other, we exchange DNA. We communicate without words. We are separated from the outside world only by the lining of our gut, which is literally one cell thick. Our guts house 90% of our immune system and the gut-brain axis means our moods and states of mind– our very sense of ourselves– are governed by trillions of bacteria inside us. We have more bacteria in us than human cells. We are always interacting with viruses, bacteria—with nature—but we try to deny and control this “threat”—with masks or vaccines or “social distance”. We sanitize and cleanse. 

The body is a hard place to be when we separate from our animal nature. We need sun and meat and salt and skin. We need hugs and wet kisses and dirt. We need fire and water, sunlight, raindrops and darkness. Our bodies need to rip the meat off of bones, eat eggs cooked in butter, and taste our lovers’ cum. We need cold water when we are sweaty and warm drinks in the winter. We need to touch the just-picked lettuce with slugs on it, and bury our faces in our dog’s fur, and get pummeled by waves in the ocean. We need the juice of a mango dripping down our chins, and the butter melting into the sweet potato. We need to see the sunrise every morning and say hello to God. But what we settle for are pills and screens and blue light and manicured sidewalks and GMO soybeans and memes to explain it all. We look to studies on rats and mice to prove or disprove things we inherently know about ourselves and the universe. We let what we can’t explain scare the shit out of us.

The body is a hard place to be when we try to be machines optimized for productivity and consumption. We need to recognize our mundane, feral magic every day, the corporeal feast of wonder we forget and remember over and over again. The sun, the moon, the tides and the stars are as crucial to our wellbeing as our family of origin. 

The body is a hard place to be for women because we tend to divide from our bodies early; we poke, plumb and prod our bodies into whatever is considered attractive by the standards of the day. This is neither here nor there. It is simply biologically true. Men are designed to shape themselves into providers and protectors. Their value is expressed through work and brute strength, and this comes with its own brand of hardship. Boys are taught to fight, punch, kick, fuck, and build buildings, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Females are more physically vulnerable than males, but this does not mean we are inherently weaker. It’s just that the powers that be have decided what is of value the last couple thousand or so years, and it’s not emotional or intuitive strength or creative generation. We don’t pray to the divine goddesses humanity worshipped for millennia before the Church took over. We worship ownership and power over. This costs men and women both. I think this is changing. 

My body was a hard place to be as the first girl in a family of boys. My father was one of four boys. There were three male cousins, and two older brothers before I arrived. I was swathed in pink and white eyelet. My developing body was treated as a mystery at best, and a problem at worst. When I was about thirteen, my father jokingly apologized to me for giving me his thick (and very strong) legs. I laughed at this to mask my shame. It was not the first time I would turn against my body. I believed it had already failed me in its primary job of looking attractive. This passing comment shaped my understanding of my worth for decades, and it wasn’t until well into my marriage that I began to crack open the vulnerable pain underneath. I spent years keeping my husband locked out of any conversation about my body when in reality he just wanted to share in what he already knew to be my pain points. 

The author at 14. Yes, that’s a Hard Rock tee.

As I traveled the porous border between girlhood and womanhood, I only knew myself through the eyes of the male gaze because nothing else was offered. I believed I was more valuable when I donned that belted hot pink dress and my brother’s eyes rose in surprised approval at my tiny waist. I rose in value when George Schnakenberg took me to the winter formal, we shared a delicate bud of a kiss, and he never left my side. My value dimmed when I stood in front of the mirror and my thick thighs rubbed against each other. I knew women were more attractive when their thighs didn’t touch. My brothers read Playboy and Penthouse, and had pinups of Paulina Porizkova and Elle Macpherson and Kate Moss. Their sexuality and vigor was praised and nurtured. My femininity was quiet lace and polite smiles and constant apologizing when I did nothing wrong. 

I went to an all girls’ school until college; avoiding pregnancy and combating eating disorders were the main fears. Schooling girls away from boys was supposed to create strong, fearless, confident women. And in some ways it did. Learning didn’t include the male voice, and this was lovely. But I always felt single-sex education, at least back then, undermined its own purpose. If girls were equal to boys, what advantage did separating them offer? But we know that women are different from men; our learning styles and our ability to use language differ. Our body clocks are different.

Being born female is its own super power. We don’t come with the same operating system as males. And in the societal framework of the masculine, women are still disembodied but can serve on the supreme court and talk about our abortions. Our actual power isn’t able to be recognized within the confines of the masculine so women are continually positioned as victims. In my view, this paradigm— including modern feminism—doesn’t allow for a true understanding of feminine power. I found myself stuck in this mentality for decades. And the body is definitely a hard place to be when it’s told it’s powerless and victimized for decades.

But things do happen to us, and our bodies remember what our minds block out, what we put away in cold storage. Our bodies express what we won’t. The inexplicable rash, the sudden weight gain, the thinning hair, the lack of a libido. The autoimmune disease which we are told is our body attacking itself (which of course means the body is our enemy and needs outside intervention/medication to be made normal). It all means something—clues we get to unravel. But we are separated from our bodies by a medical industry that wants to sell us a pill for our brain imbalances, or a lotion, or a wrinkle cream. A surgery or a diet shake to achieve aesthetic perfection. We are born—quite literally—into this system of fluorescent lights, ICM codes, and well-meaning health care professionals who tell us our symptoms are all in our heads, that we are anxious or depressed because of a ‘chemical imbalance’. That we are a problem that needs to be fixed. In many cases, the medical industry itself is the cause of trauma or illness, and we are on a roundabout loop between doctors and the local CVS and back again. Rarely are we invited to stop and examine whether this endless cycle benefits us. We don’t realize we can just step out of their paradigm.

The body is a hard place to be because most of us have been living off of rabbit food for years, depleting the amino acids in our brains. We’ve been eating Special K Red Berry with oat milk thinking we will lose weight and instead we are flabby and angry, and it’s all our fault for not being disciplined enough. The body is a hard place to be when we punish ourselves on the treadmill for the brownies and red wine. The body is a hard place to be when you take up space but believe you shouldn’t. The body is a hard place to be when we're encouraged to dress sexy, to enjoy our sexual freedom but it’s also our fault when our date tries to stick his dick inside us when we don’t want him to. 

The body is a hard place to be when you can’t feel anger about things you should be angry about. Our fascia stores our emotions away, tucks them into the crevices of our bodies, in our tissues, until it’s safe to feel them. The problem is we never feel safe enough because we are told we aren’t. And feeling shit is hard work. So the body becomes an even harder place to be: your gut is a mess, you hardly ever poop, you are exhausted and moody. You starve yourself of food, and then binge on the weekends after two margaritas. You’re told your hormones are out of whack, so you need to be on the pill, to regulate whatever is wrong. Then you try to have babies and can’t and no one knows why. Or then you do have babies, and you “fail to progress” or your hips are not the right shape. Then you breastfeed and you’re hungry as hell but trying to lose the baby weight to fit into the skinny jeans you wore before your body and life changed forever. Then your tits sag and your vagina dries up and you have to go back to work before you’re ready, so you’re then put on an antidepressant, which you stay on until you reach menopause. Then you are told that menopause is terrible, that your body betrays you and shuts down, you are a crazy bitch who will divorce her partner, while you carry all the emotional labor for summer camps, and shuttling the kids around, and buying birthday presents, and planning travel and grocery shopping and eating clean and exercising when you have time, and reading self-help books. The antidepressants don't work, but you can’t go off them without horrible symptoms so you take them. You will caretake for your aging parents and try to connect with your increasingly moody teen. Oh, and try to be a sexy dominatrix at night with glass pores. You fail at all of this and become exhausted, resentment filling your lungs. And then they will tell you you need more hormones because a perfectly normal and interesting stage of a woman’s life has been pathologized. And then you disappear because you are no longer of interest to the male gaze, and therefore, to yourself. 

But maybe you just need some carbs and saturated fat and some primal screaming. Maybe you need sunlight, a buttery ribeye, and to do nothing for a while. Maybe you just need to listen to your body instead of an MD or a health influencer or a dietician or the evening news. Maybe your own cells have the answer.

And then maybe—just maybe—you will start to feel a curious new sensation inside, a quiet freedom. I’m beginning to think, at age 47, that trading youth for wisdom is the best deal ever. 

What if our bodies are not failing us but are having a completely normal response to the wrong inputs? A shitty career or a troubled marriage? Or to living a life that isn’t really yours? Perhaps the body is only hard because we ignore our real needs, whether for love or God (which, for me, is one and the same). It makes perfect sense; we are trained to do this from when we are babies left to scream in a room alone and we give up on anyone holding us. Then we do it to our babies, too, and call it “self-soothing”. (If one wanted to create a society of hyper-productive robots who ignore their own need for safety and connection, I can’t think of a better way.)

The body is a hard place to be when the very nutrients that make us thrive are the ones we are told by Self magazine we should avoid. Cholesterol is known as the mother hormone; meaning it makes all the other hormones possible. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. Women have been told for over fifty years now to eat low fat diets, more plants, and less meat—a plainly nutrient-deficient diet. 78% of vegans and vegetarians are women and girls ages 13-35. We have an obsession with lowering cholesterol, even though this science is deeply flawed and cholesterol is essential to health. Is it any wonder that so many women in the West have horrible menopausal symptoms? We have been misled into robbing our bodies (and offspring) of critical nutrients in the name of being healthier (not to mention smaller) and it’s a disaster. I sat for years apologizing for my appetite with my girl friends. That was if any of us actually ate sinful, manly, fatty red meat. It was always fucking salad and lean chicken.

And sometimes a salad is lovely. Geneen Roth says “eat what the body wants” but I was not raised to understand what that means. Around puberty, my body became my enemy, to be controlled, mistrusted and cajoled into thinness through deprivation or sweating. My disconnection to my developing body was further cemented by my diet of fat-free fig newtons and Diet Coke and Lucky Charms. It’s one fucked up merry-go-round.

Our bodies have stored everything since we were born and they do not forget. Our bodies remember the sexual assaults, being grabbed on the train, being whistled at on the street, being disbelieved, being complemented for being thin even when we were sick, painting our faces until we don’t recognize ourselves, walking in heels we can’t actually walk in, sucking in our stomachs for every picture, pulling our neck skin back in the mirror, paying hundreds of dollars to have a toxin plunged into our foreheads, fucking when we don’t want to fuck, difficult labors and being ripped apart vulva to anus. 

If our bodies really listen to our thoughts about ourselves, then no wonder the body is a hard place to be.

All of us were an egg inside our mother’s ovaries inside our grandmother's bellies. We carry their sexual trauma, their meek smiles, their servitude, their swallowing of their pain. Ancestral trauma alters our DNA, and it is formed inside our cell membranes as we form. We feel the tears they cried and the sex they had and the opportunities they skipped or were denied. We carry around the ways our mothers and grandmothers ignored their bodies, the toxic make up they used, the cigarettes they smoked to keep themselves thin, the sugar they binged on secretly because they were not allowed to have a real appetite. Mother and babies literally have cells from each other inside them forever. 

The good news is that we also inherit our mothers’ and grandmothers’ recognition of themselves; their joy and sweet laughter, their recipes for nourishing foods, and their private courage in the face of hard shit. We inherit the ability to open our hearts and minds to encompass more in ourselves than the world sees of us. We can foster our deep intuition, and honor the sacred truths and wisdom of our bodies. It's all right there, always available. We can change the way our DNA is expressed and we change it for our children and all the generations after them.

But first we have to acknowledge what we have forgotten. 

The body is a hard place to be when we wake up to our periods and curse our own blood, our healthy flow–our first sign of health–we turn away from our own vitality. When we look in the mirror and grimace. When we eat when we aren’t hungry for food, when we deny ourselves a spiritual life, or meaning making. When we fall into despair and existential dread and forget to notice the miracle of our own making, the healthy pump of our heart, the tears we hold back that heal us. We ignore the daily platter of abundance that is our birthright.

The body is a hard place to be because we fart and poop and drool and stumble and stutter and cry and throw up and get blisters and diarrhea and have garlic breath and ripe vaginas and dirty butt cracks and hairy upper lips and stinky armpits. We have hairy moles and awkward teeth and lisps and double joints and hangnails and canker sores and blistering headaches and scars we don't want to explain and tattoos we regret. We are imperfect and evolving. We can only be in the present with what is, which is already enough. Our bodies are hard because we deafen ourselves to their cries and pleas for better food or more sleep or we mistake sex for love. When we scroll in shitty light all day, watching other women starve themselves and brag about it in our feed.

The body does not have to be a hard place. This is an idea the mind made up to quell the storms and raging fires within. The body is place of soft, sacred knowledge. Allow for it. Everything in the body exists for a reason and nothing is for naught, so listen and listen well.

And I am not a place anyway–I am a who, a being, a miracle, a mess up, a jokester, a temptress, a secret keeper, a throaty laugh, and a soul with divine purpose. 

One day I hope scientists will finally wake up and open their eyes and see that inside our cells, in our mitochondria, the inexplicable energy that we operate on is love. I don’t need a randomized controlled trial to know this. 

I am certain this is the truth.