There’s a lot of body horror in my work, and that’s because… there’s a lot of body horror in my life. Messy bodies, broken bodies, gooey bodies, malfunctioning bodies, crazy bodies. I’m fascinated at how fragile it all is, how many things can and do go wrong, and how it’s a miracle that any of us is functioning at all at any time. Every since my body started trying to eat itself 20 years ago, I’ve became intensely aware of all the challenges that come with wearing a space suit made of meat in order to get around in the world.
I’ve been in the grip of an extreme anxiety the last couple of months, which I suspect has to do partially with just being Of An Age At Which Women Become Bog Witches, but it’s been fascinating to watch this sudden escalation of it from the inside. So many of our modern, chronic stressors are the sorts of things that must be solved with emails and spreadsheets and budgeting tools and contracts. Far fewer stressors these days can be quickly resolved by simply running from wolves or turning and fighting the fucking bear.
This leaves our bodies in a strange spot. Flooded with cortisol, your body coursing with adrenaline, you’re expected to sit quietly and walk quietly and speak quietly and smile and smile and be a villain. While I certainly have drug assists for these things, a number of stressors hit all at once these last two months, and it’s made it feel like I’m being chased by wolves AND bears while my family is simultanerously on fire and there is… nothing truly physical I can do with all that energy. My body wants to fight it, to outrun it, but the actual way to deal with these challenges is just…writing more fucking emails and moderating my speech during difficult conversations. Afterwards, you just want to run around the street screaming about how ridiculous it all is.
It got me thinking about that scene in Midsommar where the protag starts just sobbing and screaming with grief and all the women come around and circle her and embrace her and start screaming and crying with her. It’s eerie, surreal, but I could see the comfort in that: in seeing these intense feelings you have mirrored by others. Suddenly you’re not struggling alone in your head, you’ve manifested it. You can acknowledge it. The mirroring is a gift. It says, we’re all crazy sometimes. Grief and stress are crazy and human and we are all humans together.
There is no room for collective grief and stress and airing of grievances in modern life. Everyone hauls themselves out of bed and shows their teeth for instagram and scrunches up their faces into grimaces that can be interpreted as smiles. Because under capitalism, in particular, there is no room for weakness. You are a cog producing value. You are easily replaceable.
And our bodies know this. But they also still know, at some level, that all this shit is made up.
It’s. All. Made. Up.
For me, the only way to overcome it on the daily has been employing every stress and anxiety tool in my arsenal. I’m looking forward to a checkin with my doctor about additional options. Exercise remains the surest way to burn off that cortisol. If my body was to run from wolves, then let’s go RUN FROM WOLVES. Every time I take an action to address a stressor, I write it down. I acknowledge we are all of us fighting dragons, every day. I acknowledge it’s a wonder any of us are getting up in the morning, carrying around these fragile bodies, showing teeth and making words and driving cars and making food and getting up: again, and again, and again, getting up.
Whenever I fear I’ve ruined my life, that I’ve made some catastrophic failure I can never recover from, I remind myself that the key to just… haul up that meat suit every day. Scrape it off the floor. Hydrate it. Slather it with sunscreen. One foot in front of the other. Write the email. Do the work.
The only way out is through, even and especially in a body miraculously still held together, wild horror that it is.
