I Have A Body

A few unhinged thoughts on bodies, fantasies and delusions

There are certain instances when I become aware that I have a body. When eating, when exercising, when having sex. Mostly I am reminded that I have a body when it starts to crave things. In my twenties, these cravings were more like performances of desire. The first boy I kissed at university, low-fat yoghurt, sex with the sixth boy I kissed at university, Ryvita, sweet potatoes, cottage cheese. These were all examples of things I thought I needed in order to become a woman. Of course, very few people have a bodily urge to eat Ryvita, but I believed that if I ate that instead of a piece of toast, then either the first or the sixth boy I kissed at university might eventually become the last boy I would ever kiss, and then everything would be fine.

I’ve noticed that I understand the true boundaries of my skin is when my body simply stops working. This is particularly visceral when I am empty. Like when I cannot bare to eat, or perhaps doing the opposite of eating - which I try not to do anymore - the irony being that the act of emptying always reminds me that I have a body and that I should learn to take care of it more.

Nowadays, as my body bends past the boundary of thirty; when tiredness is de facto rather than simply the result of a few late nights; when blocked sinuses and persistent coughs and foggy brains are more frequent than the late nights - I understand what it really means to ‘crave’.

I eat breakfast-for-dinner two nights in a row for this very reason. I feed myself leeks and sprouts and kale and turmeric and chilli and eggs and it refuels me. I gulp down a smoothie and it’s not that twenty-something problematic satisfaction of consuming less that I’m after, but in fact the bodily appreciation of ingesting something that will do me good. Like when you’re thirsty and you down a pint of water and you feel your brain throbbing with gratitude. Rather than set myself a ritual or a goal of ‘eating healthy’, my body naturally searches for ‘something good’.

I don’t know where I learnt what is definitively good or bad, or whether I even believe in those binaries anymore (I shouldn’t), but I do know that now when I’m hungover, I’m just as likely to seek out a green juice as I am a McMuffin.

I flick through hundreds of pictures of myself in the company of others and this time the corporeal reminder is cruel.

Because the fantasy of the self is also the delusion of the body. A trick of the mind and a disproven assumption that we could ever truly see our whole selves. The mirror reflects. The camera distorts. The eyes can gaze at parts but never the whole. I can see my legs, my hands, my feet, my stomach, but I cannot take it in all at once. I’m grateful for that. It would certainly be a thing to behold. Instead, I can use my imagination.

In my fantasy (or is it my delusion?), I am always kissed by the sun – a shimmering, golden, gleaming vessel, smiling with full cheeks and bare skin and beads of water running down my back. My hair is always in-between wet and dry; and I’m just about to eat, or have just eaten; or am cooking or have just cooked; and I’m both inside and outside, playing with the elements, and the air is warm. I like to live in this daydream of myself, imagining my body rather than being reminded by it, even though what I should do is accept that I do indeed have this body, and that the fantasy can in fact be the reality if I just believe in it enough and stop caring about what other people think.

I usually indulge in my delusions when I’m lying in bed about to fall asleep, thinking about more binaries like the hot and cold of intimacy. This is when bodily thoughts drift up and become purely cerebral. I try my hardest to dream of the fantasies I hold under the edges of my skin – the elasticated desire and the imagined futures – but they only ever exist in waking moments. Something about controlling the narrative.

In the morning I always remember eating in my dreams, but can never recall the taste.

Of course we must have the fantasies (and the delusions) in order to have the reality. To me, hunger has always existed in that liminal space between the two. Hunger begins as a fantasy - a mere thought or idea, sometimes prompted by your body but sometimes the other way round, too. I think about how good it would be to cook a lasagne - how the béchamel would ooze out of the sides, how the corners would crisp up, how the pasta would melt into the sauce - and perhaps I even do it. And when I sit down to eat it, the hunger dissolves into reality; or turns into pleasure and then satisfaction. But it always returns.

Does desire follow the same pattern? Desire is always imagined until something real attempts to satisfy it. Although I guess the difference between hunger and desire is that there’s very little room for error when trying to satiate an appetite. Desire is less controlled. The outcomes are too varied. The potential for failure too great, whether it’s rejection or disappointment. Perhaps that’s why I sometimes prefer to think of desire as a fantasy, and hunger as a reality. The stakes are lower when it comes to appetite. I can crave a lasagne, cook it, fail or succeed, eat and finish. Failing in desire feels more personal, doesn’t it? In both cases, I can quite literally feel it in my body.

I conclude that perhaps the answer is to stop thinking about my body so much, and start existing in it instead. This feels easier said than done, but I take up the challenge, refusing to be thought of as someone who lives more in her delusions than she does in her reality.

In her book Small Fires: An Epic In The Kitchen, Rebecca May Johnson celebrates the unassuming subversiveness of Nigella Lawson, a personality who is so emphatically associated with her form. I read the following passage and let it sink in.

Nigella encourages readers and viewers to refuse the abjection of their bodies. Pleasure is the baseline. These are hard lessons to hear if you have been taught to unhear them… Nigella encourages contemporary audiences to desire, to cook, to eat; to demand more than mere subsistence.