Failure of Flesh

It sometimes seems as if there is one correct form of body positivity: one that prizes cis, White, abled women thinking that they are beautiful. I am not the first to notice this, or the first to ask, where do I belong in this movement?

How do I love my body when it doesn't love me back?

My fight is not for loving, or for thinking I'm beautiful. My problems will not be fixed with surface level, 'hey, plenty of people want to fuck you' narratives. My body hurts. It is tired all the time. It no longer lets me do the things I used to love to do. For me, the fight is acceptance of my body, tolerance of its limits, finding a place where I can let go of my frustration over how my own flesh has betrayed me.

I used to love hiking. There are pictures of me only a few years ago up in the rain on Hadrian's Wall. I am overweight, but I look pink cheeked and happy. I felt pain on that walk, but it was the wholesome pain of effort. A badly stubbed toe, aches and pains of all that climbing and walking. All the same, I got the bus for the last three miles. I didn't have them in me. I felt good about myself, and I raised money for charity.

Now, the short walk from my bus stop to my therapist is often agonising to the point of tears. Something is badly, badly wrong with my body. No matter how fat you are, it's not OK to suffer like this.

I have become an expert in kinds of pain. There is the good pain I described earlier, that happens after exertion. A productive kind of suffering. There is my Normal pain — a warm aching that lives in my back and hips and knees every day. Sitting, sleeping, walking, it's there, telling me not to get over-confident, telling me it owns me. It's tiring to hurt every day.

Then there's my Bad pain. This is when walking — the simplest thing, a thing that has brought me joy and comfort and satisfaction — makes me sob and grunt aloud. On the pain scale, I rank this pain on a six or seven.

How can you come to good terms with your body when everything you do sparks suffering? How can you love the flesh you're in when it leaves you sobbing with mingled pain and frustration because yet again you can't even get down to your local shop?

I try to be kind to this body of mine. I feed it healthy meals. I move it as much as I can without hurting it. I let it rest on good mattresses and float in hot baths. It rewards me by caging me inside my own house, isolating me.

Recently I had to take my body for a blood test. The doctor ordered this test to see if there is a simple cause for the pain. If there is, I don't care how destructive the cure is to my long-term life, I will take it. I no longer care about living long; I care about not hurting anymore.

On my way to the blood test, my knee started feeling so sore I imagined it as a swollen, poisoned cyst, ready to burst out. If I could cut the pain out of me I would.

I want to have my freedom again. I want to stop hurting.

My therapist says that I shouldn't divorce myself from my body. She says I am not only my body, but I am partly my body, and separating us is impossible. It means I ignore the things it tries to tell me. But following her advice to listen to my body and feels the things it tells me has brought the pain fully into my life and made it impossible to ignore. I used to dissociate myself away from it and run my hurting body until it gave up; now I am frustrated because I can't do that.

It's a process, a progress. I hope that in a year I will look back at this and think, it's better now. I have ways to manage this pain. I have ways to live my life again. I can accept this meat, this body, my cage and my vehicle, and she and I are no longer enemies.

Right now, though?

I don't know.