Finding Myself In My Body: Reclaiming Pain
The thing about memories of bullying, body shaming, abuse, violence, assault is that they’re intangible. It’s even hard to capture them in words. Yet, they lodge in pieces inside the body & erode the insides with every breath. When those insides are housed in a female body, it’s not a house as much as a warzone. Courtroom for custody battles. Dumping ground for the unprocessed pain of those in male bodies. Trophy, armour, shield, weapon for those without a sense of self. Lifeboat for narcissists. There is no room left to breathe a sense of self. How do you ground yourself when you are constantly being untethered from your own body?
And outside the body, the camera, spotlight & eyes are knives. Surgical scalpels as well as swords. Life, no more than the quest to wield one, to avoid the other. There are beacons & there are new war cries. Every ally comes at a price, a toll exacted on this very body.
My body is tired. That tiredness is tangible, solid. It is big enough for me to hold on to. I can use it to shape words, imagine a griphold. Maybe it will be strong enough to push out my colonisers. At least my tiredness is my own.
