Bodies! We all got ‘em!
You know how a marketer you’ve been following for a long time will suddenly pivot “to wellness/health/fitness and start sending you all this stuff like… “hydration is the third eye” or “life hack: wear a hair shirt while you code.”
(I sent this to a friend and she was like… No, I don’t know what that’s like, H.
I forget I read a lot more chaotic evil emotional intelligence business books than most people.)
So suddenly this person who was teaching you about SEO is like… “Here’s how to get jacked!
I don’t know you. I don’t want to get jacked. Leave me alone.
And yet.
I want to write more about the body, particularly the ways the body is related to thinking, writing, not being miserable all the time, and television.
i.e. all the things I write about all the time.
But I don’t want to be like those “high on life/wait actually maybe just high on cocaine business guru” types.
And as a short but otherwise pretty normative looking dude (white, thin, no visible or physical disabilities) with a lot of admittedly kind of insane wellness habits (but not disordered! I did a lot of work on it!) , I don’t want to be “that guy”, you know?
I read physical therapy books and do animal movements in parks for fun.
My relationship with my body, wellness, shame, and stigma…
Well, it’s a lot different from most of the people that I know.
Especially people who have any sort of trauma, patterns of dissociation, mental health struggles, and all of that good stuff.
That said, the work I find most interesting in the world is at the intersection of the body, our understanding of work/play, and the physiology of feelings.
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In most fiction, especially the kind of fiction most people I know like to escape into, people have bodies.
There isn’t very much fiction where people spend their days the ways I tended to spend my days during the pandemic: pacing back-and-forth from one screen to another, not taking care of my body or myself.
The fiction where this does happen usually is Making a Point — it’s noticeable and breaking the norm of what we see in most other fiction.
It’s funny because for most people I know at least during the pandemic, not having a body felt like the norm.
I notice this in these “imagined hopeful future” workshops too.
A large part of those workshops is about recalling the feeling of a particular emotion in your body, or writing about your experience in a sensory way.
Often, quite often, people will say to me afterwards, “hey! That was great, but… I don’t know what it feels like to have a feeling? In my body or anywhere else? Haha great workshop though”
But most of our fiction, particularly in popular genres, like action movies, thrillers, superheroes — there are fights scenes, chases, backflips. Even that freaking chess show was all about the timer thing that she hit, what are those called? Anyway.
In fiction, people have bodies.
Do we have bodies in real life? I’m not sure.
I’m not sure if we’re comfortable with having bodies in real life, even as an idea.
Martial arts, parkour, gymnastics, really any type of movement that isn’t attached to success — in a sport, in social capital, or implicitly (though we’d never say it out loud) attached to an aesthetic goal feels almost… Delusional.
Doing it, telling other people that you’re doing it, feels like admitting you’re untethered from reality.
So saying “I want to write more about the body” feels like I am confessing to diving into one of two sides of an unappealing spectrum. One is the “wellness icon” who almost certainly has unsavory ties to QAnon.
The other is the “radical dance movement coach,” who probably has the right idea, but my own shame around bodies makes me have nothing but derision for this imagined archetype.
Either way, neither of them necessarily have a ton of useful things to say to the people I care about.
People who don’t necessarily trust conversations about movement, with its emphasis on white supremacist size it’s metric oriented, branded, boring measures of success.
People who are like, “H, I’m trying to prioritize self-care but I need to read the body keeps the score, I’m not going outside to do animal movements.”
Allis sent me and Zoe this article a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t read it until this week, when we were talking about how unsexy most movies are, particularly marvel movies.
The premise of the article blew my mind. it’s worth reading all the way through to think about the function of “appearing sexy” v “being sexy” in the era of Instagram, as well as all of the weird fucked up ways we treat bodies (I just the bodies of others, but OUR bodies) in our weird fucked up the world.
But it also made me think about the fact that even though I inherently mistrust anything described as radical, there might be something genuinely radical about trying to think about movement, bodies, being present in your body, with all of the risks and bullshit that entails, in spite of everything that comes along with it.
So for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to start sending more pieces about the body.
Some of it is goofy — fitness history that I’ve been holding onto with nowhere to land.
Some might blend with writing for organizers and that’s okay — so much of writing is thinking, which I personally find a lot easier when I am not actually trying to write, but instead of walking or fighting something, or trying to do a fucking muscle up ugh
others are somatics practices, things you can do it while you’re reading these emails, if you want to, and if you’re not rolling your eyes at the prospect of doing breath work while you’re looking at your phone.
If you’re interested in this, you don’t have to do anything at all.
Just let this email pass by you and enjoy the rest of your day.
But if you’re interested — sign up here:
- H
