Loving the body you have, not the body you want

What I am thinking after a year of losing self-sufficiency:: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 12th 2024

Dear soft heart,

It is my birthday tomorrow and I am thinking a lot about loving the body I have versus the body I want.

This past year of my life I have had to move away from a lot of belief systems that ran my life that were stopping me from loving myself. I discovered that since so many of the systems and the culture I grew up in prioritized self-sufficiency as the holy grail, the best measure of success I had was my self-sufficiency.

In my worldview, if I was not that, then I had failed. Like morally, physically, systemically, religiously, failed. In equal measure the more and the quicker I was self-sufficient in life, the better I was at life and the more worth I had. I had figured out the key to life with this formula!! I just had to be generally perfect, able to do everything on my own, and I would be good to go. Let’s fucking do it!

Self-sufficiency meaning being completely physically and financially independent. Self-sufficiency meaning not needing any or as little help as humanely possible.

So what happens to me then when I have a life-shattering, life-altering autistic burn out that also takes chronic illnesses out of remission for me, which directly affects this prized self-sufficiency that reigns supreme, and these are my beliefs?

Well, my entire self-worth crumples.

I think, no, I know that I am a failure.

For many years of my life I fought very hard to have access to a level of competency that allowed me to be in line with my belief system that put self-sufficiency at the top of the pyramid as what to work toward, and what to achieve. I genuinely thought that I had great self-esteem, and self-worth, and I did, but it was under the condition of being extremely competent. My competency though as someone who fell ill in the 2000s was not necessarily inherent once I reached adulthood like many of my healthy peers. It was curated through the wellness world that did allow me to have a remission for many years. My remission was something that I worked hard to maintain in order to keep being self-sufficient. As long as I wasn’t sick, or too sick, I could still be good because I didn’t need any help.

An oracle from the wild offering deck by Tosha Silver I pulled

If I didn’t have the body I wanted inherently, I could create her through diets and regimens, and protocols, and treatments and multiple modalities. There’s not much I haven’t tried to heal any lack of competency I perceived I had (which was a lot – I literally have a lifelong disability, several chronic ailments, and succumbed to a lot of internalized ableism), and to maintain this competency.

In this last year of my life, I have lost self-sufficiency due to acute autistic burn out. It has been absolutely terrifying and truly the worse in so many ways!!! AND AND AND. I have learnt to measure success differently and change my beliefs to accommodate the fact that I feel like I deserve love – even when I don’t have the body that I want. As I feel everyone deserves love, including the body that I have. I have been invited to consider other ways of measuring what makes a successful life - you know, for my sanity.

Some of my measures of success before were:

·      Work/ production metrics: How many sessions I had per week, month and year with clients; How many group coaching programs I built and taught per year; How many classes I facilitated per year; How many creative retreats I hosted per year; How much praise and happy clients and customers I had per year; How much art I made and published

·      Money metrics: how much money did my biz make?

·      Marketing metrics: did my marketing have good conversion rates? How well did my sales and launches go?

Work and financial measures of success were generally about the more the better, but also the quality also mattered. Did it land with people? Did people appreciate it? Was I valuable? Was I contributing to the world in a meaningful way? If I could say yes, then I felt worthy and I felt like I was successful. Very scary then to lose the ability to do most of these things.

More personal measures of success under the belief that self-sufficiency was best looked like:

·      Health metrics: How many tasks can I do alone without any assistance: cleaning, food shopping & cooking, driving, carrying and lifting things, executive function skills, etc. How is my sleep, my digestion, my breathing and my exercising? (the more near perfect the better, without assistance most importantly) Am I prioritizing to spend my money on health related endeavours to safe guard my competency?

·      Social metrics: How many friends can count on me? How much quality time did I make for loved ones? Is everyone I love generally happy with me, feeling seen by me and feeling loved by me?

As you can imagine if I could not do even one of these things, sleep normally let’s say, I immediately felt like a failure. Combine the inability to do most of these things all year, most of the times, oh god damn, the love for myself went away in an instant.

Now some of my measures of success are like this:

·      Did I enjoy a sensation today?

·      Did I eat something yummy?

·      Did I drink something nice?

·      Did I feel grateful for something I *do* have?

·      Did I see something beautiful or cool?

·      Did a kind animal visit me? (They do all the time!)

·      Did one of the elements of the earth (air, fire, earth and water and company) bring me any solace today?

·      Did I laugh?

·      Did I enjoy a piece of media today?

·      Did I get to express my creativity?

·      Did I love someone?

·      Did someone love me?

Usually, I can say yes to at least one of these every single day. Often times, I can say yes to many of them. And therefore, since these are the new measures of success, and success isn’t as tied into self-sufficiency for me anymore, I can feel some love for the body I have come through.

A spring tree I saw while outside the other day (yes, I did see something beautiful)

I think traditionally, we think about the body we want as like the fit body or the ideal body of what we think will make us desirable and fun and lovable. The body with the abs and the cute butt and the toned arms, the skinny body, the more curvy body, you get it. But what about those of us who strive to have a body that is healthy, a body without fatigue, and nerve and muscle and joint pain, a body without conditions like POTS and MCAS, a body without OCD or anxiety disorders, a body without PTSD or whatever else that plagues us deeply.

As Sophie Strand says, I am a body +. I am a body + trauma, I am a body + fungus and bacteria and viruses, I am body +. Strand also says, I will not be purified. The idea that we are unclean when we are sick or struggling either mentally or physically is pervasive.

The idea that we would have to be perfectly healthy at all times in our lives to have good bodies is just as hard to live up to as the perfect hot sexy beach bodies we have been told to want and desire and achieve since we were conditioned into culture.

What if, our traumatized bodies were still good bodies? And what if our sick bodies were also really good bodies? What if our neurodivergent and sensitive bodies were good bodies too?

My body is a traumatized body, a sick body, a superbly sensitive autistic body and one of the biggest hurdles in my life is that I wait to love my body until she is the body I want.

Except, she may never get there. So will I live the rest of my life not loving her?

I wait and wait and wait and wait to love her until she is no longer traumatized, and no longer sick and only useful in her neurodivergence. And this makes life very intense, and hard and expensive indeed.

The silly part is I do this each time my body is not perfectly healthy and I can track it through the years. Even when I was in remission. And then once one symptom gets resolved, I focus on the other one that is the matter. I remember when I had my full body vitiligo looking rash, I told myself I would love myself once the rash was gone. I just had to fix the rash and I would be okay. When the rash went away finally, I focused on something else that was “wrong” with my body.

I remember when I was going through withdrawal, I told myself I’d love my body once it stopped having tremors. Among many other symptoms. I never have tremors anymore, but I still think there’s so much wrong with my body.

When I had really bad migraines for a few years, I told myself once I fixed my migraines, I would love myself. Then I fixed my migraines and something else came up. I said the same thing about my bout of cystic acne. I rarely have pimples now, let alone acne, and I still look at my face in the mirror in the morning and think ugh to my dark eye circles. Or ugh to my few acne scars.

Back in the day, when I would have night terrors almost nightly, I said to my body I would love her when she got over the night terrors. When she stopped having event PTSD. If I could just get through the PTSD, my body would be good again. An acceptable body.

So this is my pattern. I don’t love the body I have because she is not the body I want.

I wait until she doesn’t have night terrors anymore to tell her, very well done. I wait until she can go on walks and not think about being raped to say, you know what, great job!

I wait until she doesn’t have low blood pressure anymore or until she has perfect digestion to treat her like she is worthy of my approval. I wait until the rash clears up to say you’re acceptable now. I wait until her injury site heals to tell her, okay my darling, you are now allowed to come and hug me.

How terrible.

If someone else did this to someone in front of me, who was not me, who had symptoms, I would be absolutely horrified.

The body I want isn’t the body I have. The body I have is the only one I currently have access to having a relationship with. How cruel to withhold love from her for even one more second.