On hating one's body & love as praxis

[kaberett]

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.

Comments

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

[kaberett]

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

Re: THOUGHTS, TEAL AND DEERISH.

[recessional]

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