Fiery Pen

My mind has been a shifting and unfamiliar labyrinth lately. I used to understand my brain chemistry, defective though it may be. The rollercoaster track was familiar. However, events and illnesses have shaken everything up. I have plunged into a new darkness, groping and feeling along the walls to find my way.

With that, my writing rhythm has been shattered. I have had stories pour out of me. Then I have had the words, even thoughts in general, dry up completely. As I talked about in Compromise, I am trying to just go with it.

Since the novel inspiration has abandoned me for the moment, I turned the words to therapy homework.

My therapist told me I need to integrate my self with my body, creating one holistic me. However, when I was struggling through a hike, I realized that the fragmentation of my self into myself and its shell is functional. It has been self-preservation.

I don’t know when exactly I compartmentalized my body from my larger self, severed the idea and made it an other. Likely, the crack started and spread when my eating disorder took root in my mind. A tumor with tendrils burrowing and branching into the deepest parts of me. It happened quietly, a trench opening under that dark ocean of poison.

When my body was never what I wanted or what I was told it should be, I changed from a part of me to this defective, unsatisfactory thing I was forced to reside within. This toxic idea was just another damaging symptom of the disease and served no purpose but to make it worse.

As the years passed, it wasn’t just appearance and horrendous self-image. There was injury. There was illness. My body came with increasing limitations and shortcomings. It became harder to live in the shell. Whereas deciding my body was something else because I didn’t like it made it worse, separating myself from its frustrating and disappointing home let me take a step back from the pain.

My body had the broken hip that took running from me and kept me writhing in pain for years. I didn’t give up. My body is the ugly bald freak with hideous tufts of wayward hair. I am not that gross. My body is ill with relentless new and unexplained symptoms. That’s not what’s wrong with me.

I’m not that dreaded reflection waiting for me in the mirror. That’s just where I am stuck living.
It has given me a degree of separation from all of these things that make me miserable. I am already trapped within them, bound up in their side effects and constraints. Thinking of it happening to just my body reduces the ownership. I can hate my body without having to roll my full self into the package.

Coping mechanism.

But is it helping?

On the one side, my brain started doing this for a reason. It offers a degree of pragmatism. It insulates me from what my body is. This allows me to be the victim in the dynamic, allows me to baby myself and turn all my rage and angst at my body. Because there is nothing else to blame in these situations.

Yet, on the other, it turns me against my body. All of my negative feelings are poured onto my own flesh. I do not care for my body because it is the enemy in all this. It does not do what I ask. It consistently fails me. I punish my body for all of it. I am burning down my own house.

So, at this point in my journey (hopefully halfway through), what should I do?

I have hated my body for decades, and it has made me miserable and insane. But it has also elevated me out of the bottom of these depressions. Do I keep myself guarded, hiding my most tender self? Or do I finally integrate and face what I would need to accept? I honestly don’t know which is better.

I fear it would take a lot for my body to forgive me after all these years of blame and abuse. Often, I think all that is happening with my physical body and health is a final revolt on the part of the flesh. I never appreciated or cared for it, so now it gives me what I deserve.

But even in this musing, I put myself and my body at odds. I have wrong it; it has punished me. If I am ever going to attempt another approach, my brain needs to break that binary.

Can we be one? Can I truly adopt these problems, make them mine rather than what is happening to me, and care for them?

It feels like surrender, acquiescence. Even though my efforts have amounted to nothing in years, it feels like giving up, and it feels like things will get worse if I do. I don’t want to accept living in this body, but will it make it easier if I do?

I need to try something because this is currently not sustainable. As my body (or I) encounter more challenges and physical setbacks, I can’t turn more aggressively on myself. My body won’t give me peace lately, so maybe I need to make peace with my body.

Christina Bergling

https://linktr.ee/chrstnabergling

Like my writing? Check out my books!

• Followers – You never know who is on the other side of the screen. Followers is a mystery and thriller that blends women’s fiction with horror.
• The Rest Will Come – Online dating would drive anyone to murder, especially Emma.
• Savages – Two survivors search the ruins for the last strain of humanity. Until the discovery of a baby changes everything.
• The Waning – Locked in a cage, Beatrix must survive to escape or be broken completely.
• Screechers – Mutant monsters and humans collide in the apocalyptic fallout of a burned world. Co-authored with Kevin J. Kennedy.
• Horror Anthologies