When Bodies Do the Heartbreaking...

The body is the only uncontested home we’ll ever have. Houses can be taken by banks. Banks can go under. Governments can unravel and leave land as spoils of war. Houses are vulnerable to wiles of weather, to capitalist greed of rich displacing those with less, etc. Any building, any land we hold affinity to can be dominated or undone until we no longer belong there. That brings its own special heartbreak…it forces a person to rebuild, resettle. At best one purchases a new place and feels alien in it for awhile. A worse scenario, one settles outside on a different part of town, with sidewalk that’s hopefully safe enough to sleep on but not so high traffic that NIMBY’s call the cops just as your body heat knocks the chill off your sleeping bag. Brutal and also clear that movement to new space is what’s called for.

I wont pretend the following is a healthy comparison. Tragedy is tragedy. Still I envy the clarity of that, of more linear struggles, because what are we to do when the betrayal is within our skin? I have nowhere else to go. These bones are it. For better or worse, before I had the autonomy of prefrontal cortex seated decision making, I was bound, until death bares me departed, to this body. Whether rich or poor, this body can’t be traded. She is me. I am her. We are many parts intended to cohesively function together as one, and when there is debilitating malfunctioning, we are one nonetheless. In sickness and in health, this body…home. Mortal and only semi-healing, resilient illness has invaded. So here I am. Dominated but nowhere to even attempt to flee.

Now after years of illness my broken heart doesn’t know where to rest. The wandering for relief happens in research of remedies, in the constant shifting of roles as my own: healthcare manager, nurse, doctor, herbalist, physical therapist, medical expense accountant, accommodations advocate, researcher and beyond. Like for many unmarried chronically ill adults, I must be my own everything. I do not have money for hired assistance. One body, many hats, while hoping my performance in one of them will earn me an inch of healing or two. But none of these worlds of medical data synthesis & task management have a seat for a grieving heart. The experience feels crowded, to physically feel unwell and to emotionally register grief? Claustrophobia inducing. I have no control over the physical distress of sickness, so when the grief feelings tap on my nervous system to be heard, I am not always kind to them. Sometimes I swallow them whole. Does that only make them stronger? Yes, but still I do it. Other times I let them perch on my shoulder and stare off with me into the abyss of no answers, no suggestions, or ideas. It’s a dry acknowledgement, no more, no less, but an improvement from suppression. On good days I cry. Those I deem good considering that at least then a release valve has functioned, and for a bit, after the tears, my chest feels a little more free.

Again, let me say, I hold that all suffering is horrid. This is a crude comparison. It’s also the best way to color out my angst for you, to trace it. Body based heartbreak is a living thing. It expands and shrinks, ties us in knots and unravels us, screams and renders us mute. It is chaos in flesh we call home. I will never be comfortable with this. I will never be that disabled/chronically ill person that calls my conditions “super powers” or worse still a “divine lesson”. I chuckle bitterly just typing that out. I loathe how those narratives stifle, shame & promote erasure of sacredly human expressions of grief. I will always long to feel well, but because these are my bones, I make do.
All things considered? That is plenty. To breathe and not combust or disintegrate internally every hour on the hour constantly is plenty. That doesn’t just go for me, but for anyone living in these constraints. How could expecting anymore possibly be kind? And do our bodies not already hold enough harm? Breathing in it is enough. 

From the chronically ill of 10 yrs 8mo & counting,

Esperanza Gene