kaberett | On hating one's body & love as praxis

There is a tendency, in some of the circles I move in, to react strongly and negatively to exhortations to "love your body". Says Hel, inadvertently prompting me to finally get around to writing about this:

I think there is often an impetus to turn "it sucks that people are conditioned to feel negatively about their bodies and we should resist that conditioning" into "everyone has to feel positive about their bodies all the time".

Which is a very helpful translation for me to see, because I find it Really Rather Difficult to be around the Very Definite "it is absolutely okay for me to hate my body, it's preposterous to suggest that I wouldn't hate my body, it doesn't do me any good at all in any way ever" line of discussion. (Because of empathising with distress; because of wanting to Explain why this is an Incorrect Approach, and being well aware that's inappropriate and unhelpful; because. Because because because.)

But: oh. It's yet another mistranslation, yet another skewing (as of gratitude exercises to snide and condescending "count your blessings"), I think? When I talk about loving my body, I don't mean the superficial "I have to feel positive about my body all the time": that's not what love is. I mean it as compassion and kindness and working-in-good-faith, as recognition that my body is doing the best it can.

You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver. ... your body, your most personal of assistants,/in its own awkwardly earnest way/really wants to make sure
you get all your messages: Sensuum,

jjhunter. There is a kind of love called maintenance: Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe.

It doesn't mean rotten, as my maternal line says, in exasperated understanding. It's doing its best. And being kind to it doing its best turns out to be pretty good practice for being kind to me doing my best, and working out what that might look like on any different way. Love not as a variable state, but a process (The Indelicates); love as a verb, not a noun; love as work. It is cruel to tell someone that you love them, if what you mean is that you're enamoured of the idea of a static and unchanging snapshot of them, filtered through your own perceptions; love should, surely, embrace messiness and uncertainty and wobbles and mistakes, should think I don't yet know how but I trust we can sort this out.

And so: I love my body.

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Misery: yeah, my body doesn't make me miserable very much, these days, and when it does it's in "normal" ways (I loathe and resent having colds), or I've got coping strategies (in particular for lungs, my "I am awful and useless and don't deserve to exist in the world" gets redirected into defensive rage and fury at people poisoning me), or I'm in no fit state to string a sentence together let alone actually talk to people, so it's not going to show up online much. I was distraught, for several years, about the bit where it's highly unlikely that I'll ever do serious hiking again -- and I get much more distressed and agitated and miserable about this every single time I interact with a pain clinic or a medic who's all "so why exactly do you use a wheelchair, you're too young for that" (BECAUSE IT MEANS I CAN ACTUALLY DO THINGS LIKE GO TO ART GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS AND ENJOY MYSELF INSTEAD OF WALLOWING FIVEEVA, FUCK. OFF.) -- plus a bunch of related, but I've... mostly made my peace with it, and I've mostly adjusted.

So in fact some of where I'm coming from is having non-trivial experience with being made miserable by or being scared of my body, and knowing how much happier I am over here. (It was kind of a Revelation when I was, temporarily, on a drug regime that meant I didn't hurt. I hadn't realised how afraid I was of being in pain until I... wasn't. And then the drugs stopped working, because of course they did, but luckily I managed to keep hold of "not being afraid of pain" and wow was that a significant improvement in my quality of life.) This does, of course, mean I'm a bit prone to doing the autistic evangelism thing of "but this approach is making you sad, I promise you don't actually want to do it, do this instead" + blank incomprehension at people struggling with that because of course I've forgotten the emotional specifics of the grieving process I went through to get here, in the visceral sense, so it's very easy (isn't it always) to default to "but if you just..." when there's no "just" or "easy" or "simple" about it.

(I think this also shows up in my approach to counselling -- a lot of the time, if I'm feeling agitated or angry or distressed, it's because My Model Was Wrong and things didn't happen within expected parameters and therefore I understand Nothing about the entire world and that's terrifying. A lot of my distress and almost all of my anger just... evaporates, once I've got a working model for What The Hell Just Happened. Similarly, now that I've wrapped my head around the complex version of "loving my body", I've got the working model of "my body is not an antagonist" and it's Completely Obvious to me that All Other Models Are Broken -- that's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean -- and that therefore if I just EXPLAIN this one well enough...)

(... and on top of that, of course, there's the layered and contradictory thing of second-hand distress at, more than anything else, my body remembering how miserable hating myself like that was. I'm intellectually sort of indifferent to it? But I get a significant physical and apparently subconcious stress response to people talking about how much they hate their bodies, and talking this through is at least in part an attempt to gently persuade myself that people who are in that place aren't trying to tell me that I have to go back to hating my body.)

So. I think you are quite right about approaches, and I in fact have a post brewing (revisiting the antifa discussion) about our tendency as a species to reduce things to handy shorthand mnemonics that are actively counter-productive if they're not supplied with, as you say, all the footnotes, and about needing to try out both "extremes" in order to develop the skills to end up somewhere nuanced in the middle, but that is... not a job for tonight.

(Engaging with the permission-to-express-negativity is going in a different comment because I think it's a bit tangential and it might be easier to manage the conversation if etc etc etc!)

Hahah and ironically I'm going to braid the permission-to-express-negativity back in, because I think it is kind of an important element?

Because it's not even express, I think is an important thing here: for a lot of people who struggle with the idea of "body positivity", they weren't allowed to feel negative about things (or aren't being allowed to now, or whatever). So that for them, they have at the same time been stuck in the middle of experiencing their body as Something That Causes Them Misery, while also having often been forced not only to outwardly praise and tolerate things that cause them misery, but have been told if they don't INTERNALLY ALSO have Wonderful Warm Feelings towards these things, they are Bad.

And it may actually be that for this person, being allowed to actually Feel Things is a much bigger issue/impediment than whether or not they view specifically their body as an antagonist or an ally. So it's not even that they're on a metaphorically different spot in the journey of grieving/etc, but that their journey is actually a totally different one, with different Points of Importance.

Now I happen to actually agree with you that not actively engaging with one's body as an enemy is a better idea? But that's also part of why when talking about it I tend to foreground the "you are allowed to have these feelings, these feelings are a totally reasonable response and there is no MORAL imperative for you to change these feelings. That said you may have better practical effects from changing this approach slightly, if that's available."? Sometimes it still doesn't work, because their journey is that different, but sometimes it's better.

(And I mean: I picked that up because 95% of body-positivity creates exactly that hostility in me. Because I absolutely got the "you are not allowed to have these negative feelings" crap force-fed in many, many spheres and my slightly inconvenient protective adaptation became "my negative feelings are going to get so big and so scary that YOU CANNOT DENY THEM". Which ironically means that being encouraged to love my body increases my intense antipathy for it. >.>)

Yes I think it is absolutely an important element! Just the way in which I am coming at it Sideways specifically feels like a distraction from over here? The specific-to-me bits can go in another thread, the actual main point about people in general = yes obviously relevant :-p

And, right, okay, the ways in which I'm dealing with disability involve loving-my-body-as-defiance, also, because if I can stubbornly piss people off by Not Behaving then yeppppp that is a thing I am primed to do.

Yep, this all makes sense, and possibly a useful thing for me to do here would in fact be to get around to writing up my latest round of experience with a pain clinic, which had a significant effect on my understanding of what pain clinics think they're for in ways that... yeah. Mmm. Okay.

Thank you, as ever, for babble; I very much enjoy you making words at me and making me think. <3

This is fair! *waves hands* COMMUNICATION. WHY.

*nodnod!* I am in many ways glad that I came at the body-positive movement in general via knowing

celeloriel for whom it operates in similar ways, in defiance and in the shapes that could otherwise MOST put my back six miles up and make me a Hissy Hissy Dragon, because it meant when I went in with "this is important and nurturing for someone I care about" already ticked. Which helps moderate/mediate my reactions to things.

. . .cuz otherwise my reaction would have been very very negative in ways that in and of itself would not have contributed to More Health and Understanding in the world! XD

On hating one's body & love as praxis

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.