“Tell me about your body.” She’s setting up her massage table in the corner of my bedroom while I slowly ease into my robe in the bathroom. I step out and say, “I have an arthritic foot, and my left hip is really tight.”
Fifteen minutes later, as her hands are coaxing out the mass of tension I didn’t even know existed on my occipital ridge, it hits me, “Of all the 40 years in this body, of all the places and spaces it’s taken me to, I tell her about my tight hip? Fuck. My body deserves so much more.”
“Tell me about your body.”
The first thing you will notice about my body is the absence at my throat, right in the spot yogis so often call Anahata chakra, right where I should be owning my voice and taking charge of my metabolism. There, the master gland of my body is gone. It was irradiated behind a tungsten door in 2016.
Around that same time, you would have noticed another absence in my womb. It had been unable to hold a pregnancy despite five years of monthly attempts, countless doctor’s appointments, and all the well meaning, insufferable advice from women who had that master gland in their body intact.
You may notice the absence of half of my patella tendon, harvested to replace my ACL/PCL when it was torn to shreds in a Spring exhibition soccer game for my collegiate team. If you could see the hole in my heart, you’d also notice the absence there, where I yearn to have been able to finish what I started so many years before, to put the exclamation point on my lifelong affair with the soccer pitch with an All American year or a National Championship or something other than a quiet disappearance after failed rehabilitation attempts and far too many shots of cheap vodka.
Which brings me to what is not absent in my body. You will find a 5-inch long scar on my left knee, but you will also find an inch-long scar on my right from the first stitches I received at age 8, when I fell from my bike and a male doctor told me he wouldn’t bother to stitch it if I were a boy but – since I was a girl who definitely wanted to have scar free legs – I should miss the next week swimming in the lake and head to the ER for stitches.
You will find two hernias and the remnants of a hemorrhoid sustained in my first successful pregnancy when heaving up any bit of food I ate required a full body contortion. When yet another doctor – this time female told me I should watch my weight and try to drink more green smoothies and I told her to shove a green smoothie up her hemorrhoid-free ass.
I didn’t really tell her that. But I did with my eyes. Which is one thing I do regret from my pregnancy – that I only said it with my eyes rather than with my voice. But, alas, according to all the New Age dogma I will forever struggle with my throat chakra owing to the missing gland.
You will find surgically repaired eyes. You will find what I like to claim are size C breasts – they aren’t – just starting to sag from age and too many night nursing sessions. You will find inches and inches of legs, which are tragically – according to my doctor – scarred from many more bike accidents and, of course, that fancy knee repair. You will find hair that can’t quite tell what shade it should be after so many years of highlights and lowlights and babylights and nolights and pixie cuts and bobs and attempts to grow it longer than a pixie cut or a bob. Those attempts are as failed as my ACL rehabilitation attempt.
And you will find deep beauty, especially when you see the body move on a yoga mat through a decades-long practice that has been there for the body in all the ways the doctors weren’t. You will find profound strength borne from those years on the soccer pitch but also from the years surviving the barren womb, years where the body was sent out to run away the frenetic, depressed energy.
You will find dense resilience from a body that has, no matter what has been put on it, used the weight of a life life resistance training to calcify and become more structurally sound.
And you will find the soft places, too, that fit in the palm of a lover’s hand and fill with excited electricity.
You will find it all here, the absences and the presences. This body is a miracle, and you are lucky to be in witness of it.
This essay was inspired by my real life realizations on a massage table. If you’re inspired, please write your own toast to your body. If you don’t know where to start, reach out. I have a worksheet to help you get started.