Love/Truth Is In The Details

This body is mine.

by Weronica Anna Marianna Siwiec

I had plans to write something else this week, but then I got sick—a stomach bug—and that has brought up so much medical trauma and health anxiety from my past that it’s all I can think about. I also found my ex on Tinder (he wears the stress of the last year and a half deeply on his face), and that coupled with my already delicate physical situation had me feeling even worse. I am still trying to digest my breakup from last June. It’s not any easier when your ex asked if it was ok to reach out to you at some point, and then he obviously never did, and you find him on Tinder portraying a persona you know to be false.

Love/truth is in the details.

So, I write this to you from a place of physical illness and mental anguish. It’s amazing how not feeling well can just completely fuck up your brain and body for the time being. My body is tense. My brain is firing in too many directions—and sometimes not at all (a preferred state for right now). I am simultaneously having flashbacks from being seventeen and going to too many doctor appointments to figure out what was wrong with me (long story short: it was gas + bullying). Each time I have a stomach ailment, I am taken back to that time that majorly shifted and shaped my life. I am taken back to a time of immense fear and a desire of an ending—of any kind.

This stomach, my stomach, has been through so much. I am eating less, because food is hurting me right now, and that does not bode well for my predisposed disordered eating brain. I am trying to know it’s not permanent. I am trying to know all things change/pass/end/etc, but in this moment, I am stricken with hopelessness. I am stricken with a bad taste in my mouth—one that has been there for decades.

The difference between the me now and the me then is that I get to decide the pacing of my life. At seventeen, my body did not feel like my own. It was poked and prodded. It was decided for me what was good or bad. In trying to digest the bullying I received, I was given one option: antidepressants. I went to school the day after I received three hate emails from my best friends. I was expected to go to a place that terrorized me. I was expected to hurry up and get back to normal. My body could not. And so I got sick. Naturally.

This time, with this sickness, I am deciding the pacing. I am not pushing myself. I am listening to my body. I am staying in my body. This body is mine.

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🎉 Mood Board for the Week

1. Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish? (I think yes)

2. It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people—people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes—is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get better.

3. We're All Preppers Now

4. Trying to do morning pages even when I don’t feel like it (which is a lot these days)

5. I actually really like her cookbooks and this new one looks great

6. Somatic exercises, specifically this one: once daily, notice where in the body feels neutral—feeling into that for a bit and then stopping, then orienting to the space I’m in

7. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what you’re like isn’t who you are.

8. I’m moderating this tomorrow: Black Erotic Sovereignty: an Intersectional Outlook on Sex Work, Decrim, and Communal Liberation. It’s free and virtual! Please come! (Zoom link)

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