Healing my relationship with me
“I am working hard every day so that my body and mind are no longer an oppressive system.”
I am one of the lucky ones.
I got to quarantine in a loving and respectful home.
Some of my distant family members had COVID but they got through it.
When the news of a shut down hit, I was mentally ready to completely switch gears. In January 2020 I made a conscious decision to quit all my jobs and start developing a concept for a series of workshops which later became WE TAKE FIVE. I danced in my last performance in February 2020. I produced my last show on March 11, 2020.
COVID did not steal my sense of self.
I had a consistent purpose and structure for my creativity. Throughout quarantine I got to collaborate with people I admire. With them I got to build a company that I hoped would help people connect with their bodies. Little did I know that along the way it would help me heal my own relationship with my own body.
For nearly two decades my creativity and sense of self as I experienced it was inseparable from my body. For most of my life my body belonged to someone or something else.
As babies we fully depend on our caretakers for our survival. Our bodies quite literally belong to our parents. They determine when, what, and how we do. Very quickly we learn to express our needs. We form coping techniques for when those needs are not being met. Those become more elaborate with years.
My mom was 22 when she had me. I was 22 when my eating disorder was at its most critical. She told me (I was maybe in my teens at the time) that her mom had gained a lot of weight after her pregnancy and she didn’t want that to happen to her. She also told me that after she stopped breastfeeding me she didn’t eat after 2 pm for a while to get back in “shape”. Being fit and attractive was how she knew to be independent, how to have power in a very patriarchal society.
She worked out before and after work and ate very “healthy,” and on the weekends when we had guests for barbeque, she would disappear into the bathroom and come back out with her eyes slightly red, as if she was crying. We all knew what she was doing.
At 20 I learned that it’s called bulimia in a nutrition class I had to take as a part of my dance curriculum. Until then I didn’t know it was a disease. I knew that my dad was trying to “help” her stop by ridiculing her. I knew she was ashamed of it.
During my second year of college as a dance major at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. I was learning a new movement technique with a professor, who used to dance with an American postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown. His class was a combination of breathwork, Qi-Gong, martial arts, and movement with a lot of emphasis on awareness of the body weight distribution, gravity, anatomical and energetical lines, imagination, and all other fun stuff that came with somatic practices.
But guess what else comes with somatic practices? Release. And healing, which inevitably brings up the parts of us that we tend to bury deep inside.
Whether I understood that or not at the time, things were coming up. I don’t remember the exact details. But I do remember a continuous inner conflict. It felt like parts of me were constantly fighting. My newly discovered sense of self-worth and inner peace wasn’t matching up with external feedback coming from my environment. I knew how to work with that environment very well. I know the rules of working hard and exceeding expectations. However, this new part of me kept pulling me away and judging me for wanting to submit to the game that is no longer mine.
All this tormenting got overwhelming very quickly, and with the “help” of 12 hour days, alcohol, binge eating, and cigarettes, I was able to float about without thinking too hard about all the emotions that were surfacing.
My dad always said that our body is a physical representation of our energy. My whole life the idea of “fat = lazy, unhealthy, wrong” has been drilled into my head. As long as I remember my dad would make fun of “fat” people on the street, make comments about (mostly) non-skinny women running or exercising in public. He would make fun of the fitness industry and exercise that didn’t serve a purpose outside of “fitness”. He would shame my mom for trying to be fit and thin… for exercising and for her eating disorder… These were signs of weakness and weakness is “bad.” He had shamed me during the low rise jeans era, which to be fair wasn’t that great of a look for my body structure, but still, that hurt. He did not want me to conform to the trends and influence. Was he aware of his role in these trends?
Shaming and ridiculing is his way of inspiring change for the “better.” Initiating or in most cases pushing the change for what he thinks is better is how he expresses love. That’s how he treats himself too, I think.
Anyways, that December I felt “fat” and unhealthy. It felt like I had a layer I wanted to shed. I was going home for the Christmas break and I am not sure how much of that came from my anxiety of seeing myself through my dad’s eyes as an imperfect project that needs to be fixed; and how much came from letting the stuff I’ve been storing deep inside come to the surface. Both were present. The second one I am only now recognizing.
I wanted to prove to myself and others around me that I can get my shit together. Surprising people around me and exceeding expectations has been a motivational driver of mine for most of my life. For the next 6 months I woke up with the sunrise, did an hour of Qi-Gong, ate a fully raw diet and followed an intense workout regimen. All that in addition to the average 10 am-9 pm day of a dance major at a conservatory.
At 22 I was in the “best” physical shape I’ve ever been in my life. I felt strong and fit and was getting the external feedback I was craving. I’d cracked the code. I was doing well in my dance classes. I felt an ease that I hadn’t felt in the past. Most of my life I spent catching up. I am really good at catching up, but this time I got to be the one who gets it right away. I thought all that would make me happy.
It didn’t, so I did what I knew and pushed myself further. That year I had another Trisha Brown dance teacher, and was cast in a repertory piece by that same choreographer. So it’s been a good 6–8 months of loosening things up, which once again came with surfacing of internal thoughts, emotions, and feelings I was still hiding from myself. I noticed myself falling into the familiar numbing binge eating patterns. I panicked. I felt attached to the body I’d built and all the hard work it had taken. So I did what I knew: turned on my disciplinarian, and wouldn’t let myself eat more than 1000 calories a day. Reminder: these were 12 hour dancing days.
I started losing weight. At first it felt good. I felt lighter. I felt high on accomplishment. I liked what I saw in the mirror. Mirrors… They are not to be trusted. No mirror gives us a realistic idea of what we look like. Same with cameras. Our ideas of what we look like are so distorted by reflections.
But I digress. I was losing weight and pretty quickly I started losing energy and any desire to do anything, be anything, and oh being around people was so fucking annoying. I thought it was a seasonal February depression. I was far from happy. Nothing felt like enough. Everything felt like too much of a commitment.
I remember a moment in class. I was in a twisting stretch. A classmate of mine whispered my name, gave a thumbs up, and told me I looked good. I couldn’t even look at him. I wanted to cry, scream, tell him to stop. My first thought was it’s because it was my “skinny” side and I was wearing my “skinny” tank top. Can we please stop commenting on people’s bodies unless they ask us to? Even if we think they deserve some kind of encouragement. That comment didn’t change my mind about how I felt about my body. It only proved to me that my masking, faking, and self-abusing was “working” and I am going to have to do it for the rest of my fucking life. That’s why I wanted to scream. But I looked down, smiled shyly, and said nothing, like a good girl.
I am 27 now even though I keep forgetting. It took a pandemic, “quitting” dancing for other choreographers, building WE TAKE FIVE, and continuously practicing Reiki and mindfulness for me to relearn how to love all of myself unconditionally.
I work out because I fucking love feeling physically strong. I dance because my dancing is the most articulate way for me to communicate how I feel. I rest because I need to. I eat because my body needs fuel. I do my best to do all these things mindfully so I know when it is enough.
I am not pain free but I am pain tolerant. I listen to and learn from my pain in order to love myself deeper. It is a huge privilege to have the time and resources for me to be able to arrive here.
We live in a global society that is built on and around systems of oppression. Oppression is always paired with a kind of self-appointed superiority. My sense of self was formed within these systems and, whether I want to or not, I am participating even when I am not aware of them. It is a fucking privilege to not be aware of them. Every day I try to be mindful of when I see A as superior to B. When I catch myself I take a deep breath and with compassion take responsibility for my own thoughts and actions. My guilt has very little to do with the effect my action/thought/language has. My guilt is my sign that I am functioning within a system of oppression and I have just abused my privilege. I take a deep breath and with compassion take responsibility for my own thoughts and actions. Responsibility doesn’t have to come with punishment, whether it is self-inflicted (I am so good at that one) or designed by an oppressive system. I refuse to be my own oppressor. I am working hard every day so that my body and mind are no longer an oppressive system. I refuse to believe that one version of my self is superior to the other.
I take a deep breath and choose to love all parts and versions of myself. I am both a teacher and a student at all times.
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