you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
maybe mary oliver said it best
hi,
i was telling my therapist the other day that i didn’t know where to set new goal posts anymore. i had to quit my job recently, with the need to rest and to grant myself the time (and luxury) to pace myself throughout the day, to be able to take time on sitting breaks between washing my face and refilling my water, and saving weeks’ worth of energy for a single doctors appointment because when your body has an energy limiting illness, when at a cellular level you only have so much to spend before your body forces shut down, you have to rest and bend to your body’s needs. and it has so many needs. but every activity has become so much more difficult and intensive. right now, i do not exist in the demands of 9-5’s. i work in crip time.
“For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.”
— ellen samuels
despite barely hanging onto getting through the day i still wonder what my next venture might look like months out if/when i might be at a better baseline. then i become saddened by the impossibility of it all. isn’t that a kind of cruelty to self? a tease of an exercise? a hint of torture for the soul where i imagine scenarios that i believe cannot exist (they might, they might not).
i’m used to being a planner, to building a little momentum towards things that are grander than giving myself 10 minutes to let my heart rate adjust to sitting before swinging my feet out of bed to stand. we think we know what our lives will be like when we plan for something in 3 weeks, 7 months, 2 years time. we all only operate under an illusion of choice and the ability to choose where we land, though. i think i want so badly to be able to plan/know where i’ll be in the next year, would it give me a sense of control over a life that suddenly feels like i’ve got no grasp over. did i ever have a grasp on it in the first place? sometimes i think about hiring a psychic so i can be told that the stars or my palm or my name can tell me a destined future i so desperately want to know. but i also know that no one person’s words could fix a the feeling of living in a whole world disinvested in accessibility and illness. we’ll all have to organize and demand and wait and see. life is inherently unpredictable for us all. i find a little comfort in knowing maybe there’s no control at all.
i operate on a new timescale now- this is crip time- if brushing my teeth became an activity so fatiguing that it took me multiple breaks to complete only to have to do it seated, my body making my arms so leaden and my heart rate too fast from being upright and my standing muscles so weak that every cell seemed to come to a grinding halt, pulling me back down, then possibility of brushing my teeth with ease is the latest goal. now, i have more days than not where it’s not such an insurmountable task but there are still humbling days where it feels out of range. and i have other tasks of course, that are in need of breaking down into 14 steps or impossible to complete without accommodation now. it’s weird seeing things moving at this new speed since these would have been easy, thoughtless tasks as an able-bodied person but in my new body, my disabled body, i must move at a soft pace that matches my body’s needs.
as i’m telling my therapist all of this i note, 'i need to adjust to goals that are not career-centric.’ i thought i had been attempting this for years already. but now when i remove my job entirely i realize i’m still tethered to ‘when i am able to go back to work’ and ‘should i stay in the same career path?’ like how ridiculous do i sound for that. but when i stop considering career altogether? i have to then erase the goals that revolved around the web i spun around having a job and expendable finances and an able body, like traveling and cooking and moving and spending and instead contend with who i am outside of these traits i thought were mine.
she asks me to reconsider within this new scale and what it looks like to redraw those goal posts, and i think i’d like to try 5 new things in the next year. because it feels doable and still expansive and i think there’s still a ‘me’ behind it. i could do 5 new things.
and it also turns out that when i think about those new things i want to do i actually reach for the things that childhood me liked to do. a new me with new eyes some 15-20 years later makes them new. me 15-20 years ago liked beadwork and paper quilling and making magnets and painting rocks. kind of sad to think there was one day that i just stopped and never picked it up again.
my therapist also reminds me i might hate these things, which is ok. there’s humor in it. i remind myself i can do these imperfectly and just try it for the sake of trying it anyway. i might be horrible at it, returning 15-20 years later, but there’s no competition between us. let’s just see how it goes.
i am bending and letting the soft animal of my body be what it is, want what it wants. i cannot change it (i am still frustrated at where we are but i am learning to care for it) and it is neither good nor bad for existing in its form. if it needs rest i am granting it rest. if it wants to quill some paper again i guess we’ll grant it that too. thanks mary oliver.
the softest animal,
christina
p.s. i read my first full book since august of last year, it felt like that first bite into an apple. my brain is working a little bit better these days. the book is called little rabbit by alyssa songsiridej. it reads as a bit of a fantasy with its maine artist residencies and quiet berkshires summer home. it’s very lusty, very sexy, about power and queerness and boundaries, and it leaves you with unresolved feelings about a changing self-image and how the world perceives you and the friendships that do/don’t come along when you’re not the same as you were when you were 18. loved it.