For Love Of Bodies!
On feminist collective liberation, safe and unsafe spaces, freedom from the hardest thing, and let's stop hating our bodies!
Hello Dear Beyonders!
I often ask authors about their relationships with their bodies—and how that impacts their writing and also how their writing impacts their relationship with their bodies. My body and I have lived through so much! I know the same is true of many/most/all of you. I’m always curious to hear about other people’s journeys, especially people I admire such as these glorious writers I’m lucky enough to speak with.
I’ve gathered some of their answers here. I found their words very tender, very hopeful, very truthful, very human. I also found myself in much of what they were saying, even if the circumstances of our lives and bodies are different. I hope the same is true for you.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think in the comments!
I’d also love to hear your thoughts on who you’d like me to interview next and things you’d love me to write about! ❤️
xJane
Our Collective Liberation Is Connected to Not Hating Our Bodies
That’s such a great question. You’re right, I’ve gone through different phases. Very early in my feminism—I’ve been a feminist since I learned the word when I was six—when I was about twenty, I really understood that our collective liberation is connected to not hating our bodies. Everything we’re taught by the culture is aimed at hating our bodies. It’s perplexing and tragic that even women who have the cultural ideal body feel terrible about their bodies.
As young as twenty I said, Okay, these are shackles that we must throw off. I wish I could tell you that I’ve thrown off those shackles. What I can tell you is I’ve grappled with them all these decades. And I have done everything I could possibly do to embrace other narratives about my body and about our bodies. Because I do believe that unless we do that we’re doomed.
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[read Cheryl’s full interview]Being Amongst Bodies That Make You Feel Comfortable
I’m someone who has quite a lot of anxiety from just being a person who has a body. It varies pretty widely depending on the environment in which I might find myself. My consciousness of who I am shifts when I consider how much space I take up or don’t take up, whether I’m perceived as a partner or a threat or a potential friend or potential nuisance. So my awareness of my body in a lift is going to be wildly different from my awareness in a gay sauna which is going to be wildly different from my awareness at the front of a bookstore which is going to be wildly different from my awareness in front of customs trying to get into a country.
This continually needing to assess at any given moment, yes, you are a person in a body, but the way in which it’s perceived changes depending on the context in which you find yourself is really interesting to me. But in many ways that also underlines why I’m so interested in spaces in which one can feel safe and not necessarily as vigilant about their body; whether that’s a queer space, a home or an assemblage of home-like spaces, a challenging space but a space that’s shared amongst friends, and so some of those challenges are mitigated because you’re amongst bodies that make you feel comfortable or settled.
—Bryan Washington [read Bryan’s full interview]
How To Ease Into Not Having To Do the Hardest Thing
So, two things: I am proud of my strength, endurance, and stamina. I feel really good about my body in those ways. I feel really good that I’ve come off these horses going very fast twice in the last two years and haven’t broken anything, so I’m still “bounceable.” But I’m conscious of my age, my loss of balance, my weight—all these things I have to reckon with, especially because one of these days, I won’t be able to do this anymore.
I’m writing something right now about how I believe these horses are showing me how to ease into not having to do the hardest thing, or be the best, or prove something.
[read Pam’s full interview]Making The Decision To Stop Hating Myself
I don’t know that writing about bodies helped me become more okay with my own body. I think that I became more okay with my own body after I made certain decisions about my life: I stopped going on dating apps. I stopped trying to commodify myself and turn myself into something datable. And I decided that I was going to be okay with myself and stop hating myself. It actually made me a lot happier. It freed up a lot of brain space to do other stuff. Making that decision to stop hating myself has made me better at writing different kinds of bodies, because now I feel I can create space in my fiction for the bodies that look like mine, and bodies that look very different from mine. Before all my characters have the same sort of general body.
Taylor [read Brandon’s full interview]Deep gratitude to my paid subscribers whose support keeps my spirits buoyant and this newsletter afloat. ❤️
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If you missed last month’s Writing Prompts, you can enjoy them here!
Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts! What’s your relationship like with your body these days?
And: Who would you like me to interview next? Anything special you’d love me to write about? Anyone interested in an AMA?
One of my perennial dreams is the potential power unleashed when we celebrate our body differences and let go of our obsession to make our bodies fit the oppressive body ideal upheld by systems not meant to serve us. At the same time, as a 66-year-old woman, I know what it's like to be pushed to the margins because my body is no longer valued in our youth-obsessed culture, so I also understand that making our bodies "fit" offers the illusion of security. Quite the mind fuckery! Thank you for this conversation!
I would say my relationship with my body is the best it's ever been, and that's largely an unintentional off-shoot of two years of celibacy and finally stopping using substances as an unconscious off-ramp from discomfort.
The celibacy wasn't something I embarked upon intentionally. I just ended a relationship and found that dating felt like an unnecessary and unhelpful distraction from my creative work. Having finally dug into a full-length book, I couldn't imagine where I would find the emotional juice for early romance (which I mostly find deeply stressful) and maintain any creative momentum. So, I told myself, "no dating until I finish this book", not imagining how long it would take. Two years in, and I'm still writing and who knows when I'll be done?
At the same time, I finally laid down alcohol and marijuana as habitual off-ramping behaviors. I'm not cold turkey clean-and-sober, but with alcohol I rarely indulge, and only and intentionally because, say, I'm out for tacos with a friend and a good margarita pairs so nicely. But I never keep alcohol around my house and I don't drink as an activity (Let's meet for drinks!). Marijuana not only started tanking my blood pressure, but I lost any patience with it. As in, okay, this is entertaining for about a half an hour and then I want to be done, but I'm not going to be done for a LONG time and that makes me feel trapped and regretful. Why? Just why?
I didn't intend for walking away from sex with other people and walking away from my habitual ways of avoiding my own emotional discomfort to conspire to drop me so deeply into my own body, but they did. I discovered this very tender, scared, but ultimately resilient animal living inside of me. People talk about their inner child, but for me it's really an animal. Like a deer, or one of those Northeast forest cats that's very solitary. A bobcat? When I stopped running away from my VERY BIG feelings, stopped observing myself or packaging myself or managing my physical self to be more palatable for someone else, I found a stability, an animalistic contentment in being inside my own skin and looking out at the world from behind my own eyes.
Now, I find myself contemplating relationship. I'd prefer not to be celibate forever. But I don't know how to be in relationship, to share my body and life, from this very embodied place. I don't know how to manage a more porous personal boundary without losing the ground under my feet.