Preface: Essays on the intersection of embodiment and identity
In the summer of 2018, I found myself in desperate need of a new therapist and completely unwilling to get one. Getting a new therapist should be acknowledged as one of the most traumatic things that can happen to an adult. We hear so much about how hard it is to move, or adjust to marital status changes, or have a child, or lose someone we love, and for sure, these things are hard, but getting a new therapist is almost as hard.
I loved my old therapist. Not in like a creepy transference way, but in the way you love that one person in the world you can say literally anything to without fear of being judged. I’d started seeing him three years prior when I decided that I needed treatment for my eating disorder; when I was finally able to say the words, “I have an eating disorder.”
He challenged everything I thought was true about my eating disorder — like the idea that it was really about food or exercise, or that I could get well by adhering to a well-tailored meal and exercise plan, or that I had dealt with my past traumas, that they weren’t hiding right below the shell of meticulous control that governed every aspect of my body and my life.
He pushed me to recover when I didn’t think it was possible. He taught me how to sit through suicidal ideation and intrusive thoughts of self-harm. He walked me through a troubled marriage, and finally through the most painful experience of my life — when my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
Then, he was gone. And I had to accept that therapists have lives outside of their offices.
After months of belligerence, of refusing to find a new therapist even though my marriage was crumbling under the pressure of unhealthy coping mechanisms, toxic communication styles, and unimaginable grief, I found myself sitting across from a new therapist.
As I begrudgingly talked about the issues that had forced me there, a barrier broke and as much of my history as could fit in an hour-long session poured out. Over the next few sessions as I talked to her about the things I felt defined me — my sobriety, my recovery from my eating disorder, living life as a fat woman, my marriage, my pregnancy loss, my deep desire to be a mother, my identity as a writer and a childcare provider — I came to a stunning realization. All of the experiences that I felt defined me, all the pieces that made up my identity, were somehow related to my body. I vividly remember sitting in this new therapist’s office and saying, “It’s pretty much all about my body.”
I still haven’t quite figured out what I meant by that, but the day after the words came out of my mouth, I woke up early in the morning, got into a bubble bath, and started jotting down notes for this collection. As a writer, most of my processing happens when my fingers peck around a keyboard and words come out on the screen. For every event of significance in my life, there’s an accompanying journal entry or essay or article that I wrote to gain a deeper understanding of what happened, my feelings about it, and what I could do to heal. So, when I came to the understanding that most of my life experiences center around the tumultuous, mercurial relationship I have with this body of mine, I knew that it would take a lot of writing to figure this one out.
As I soaked in the tub I thought back to the very first time I was aware of experiencing the world through the perspective of my body. And then I went through my life chronologically and wrote down every experience I could think of that had to do with how I related to my body and how others related to my body. When the list was done, the outline of the story of my life, the story of my body was laid before me. The story of a girl becoming a woman, of falling into and out of love with addiction, of self-harm, of an eating disorder, of chronic illness, of pain and loss, love and hate. The story of this body that has carried me through my entire life, the body that I have hated, abused, and abandoned, and the body that I finally accepted, made peace with, and sometimes even loved. But ultimately what I saw in this list was a story of healing, of gaining a hard-won peace with myself and others. Writing these essays has helped me begin to understand what I meant that day in my therapists’ office — like it or not, it really is all about my body.
These essays are more for me than they are for any of you. Though in my years as a writer I have learned that the things I write for myself, the things that I write so I can heal, also help others heal. There’s a power in shared experience. There’s magic in knowing that someone experienced what you’ve experienced, that someone felt exactly the same way. That power and that magic cannot be released into the world when we keep our stories to ourselves. And that’s why I’m sharing these essays instead of keeping them to myself.
