mind/body/split

It’s interesting having a body. I just turned 48, which makes me soundly middle aged. I don’t often feel it, no one seems to think I look it, and I don’t think I act it—which is to say that I don’t feel, look, or act as I expected I would at this age. I really thought my life would feel much more solidified when I got here, but here I am and all is as fluid as it has ever been.

“Fluid” is an eldritchly apt term for me right now. I just wrote a piece for Filthy Gorgeous Things on fluids, which is to say more exactly the white tiger of female sexuality, which is to say more exactly squirting, which is to say yet more exactly female ejaculation. I wrote the piece for FGT’s Discovery issue, and I did indeed suffer a recent discovery in fluid form. The piece is free, and you can read it here.  I’ve heard it’s kind of hot, and if you’re in the mood for hotness, you should just click that link and abandon this post, which is not hot.

This piece of writing is less about pimping that piece of writing and more about the confluence of events that made that discovery possible, and that confluence of events is most simply aging.

I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I grow old, and if you’re lucky, one day so too will you. Rolling of trousers is optional, aging not so much. If you live, you will get old, and there it is in its stark, jolie-laid, and wabi-sabi glory. You have a body; it’s interesting. In fact, there are two points when your body seems most interesting, and those two points are pubescence and menopause. I’m not sure how you men-folk understand the great Change of Life, but those two prolonged moments seem to me the bookends of physical interestingness.

I am not yet menopausal, in point of fact, but I see it looming as a monolith. It’s in the distance and every day it gets larger until one day I won’t have a choice but to confront it. Every month, I still get my period. The Change is yet to come, but come it will; in fact, comes it does. From my perspective, watching The Change come incrementally closer is not unlike my experience at eleven of watching my nipples grow soft and my mound grow downy. It’s just less quick, less sanguine, and less anticipated. I’m in the middle of Change, and it makes my body interesting.

Most of my adult life, I’ve just lived in my body. Sure, I waged war with it, and I found détente with it. I hated some parts and loved others, I got angry at its shape and its feel, its size and its contours. I vainly primped and stroked and patted, as women do. I have shaken and shimmied and paraded and pranced, both for money and for fun. I have shared my body with many people, and I’ve shared great passion with a handful of them. But mostly, I lived in my body. I felt emotion and sensation. I didn’t feel much of a split.

A few years ago, I got pneumonia. I was sick enough to spend a week in bed and crack ribs coughing, but I was so poor that I didn’t go to the doctor’s, and I couldn’t afford to take time off from work. It was the first time that I felt the crush and press of my own mortality. Your body can—and will—fail you, I thought. It was sobering, weird and ironic. Being a morose and depressive type whose daily thoughts had often been punctuated with thoughts of suicide, I ought not to quail at my own mortality. I should be pretty accustomed to it. And yet.

So there I was, hacking so hard that I cracked my ribs from the inside and living for several weeks with the lingering pain, a stabby reminder every time I reached too quickly for a book or a can or my dog. I had an epiphany. I realized that one day my body, this body that I had loved and hated myself and with which I had loved and hated others, would fail me. It wasn’t a question of if; it was a question of when. And then, as one does, I got better, and the thought went with the illness.

I have a high pain tolerance. Part of it is the deeply Protestant nurture of my family. Part of it is dancing for six years and lifting weights off and on for thirty. I treat my body cavalierly, pushing through the pain because pain is for pussies. Injuries are for the weak. The strong are Cock-D, and I am the strong. I am, in fact, such a commando that I had been walking around with my rotator cuff torn about 75% for untold swaths of time, a fact discovered by my doctor about six weeks ago. He scheduled me for surgery the next day.

I’ve rarely been an invalid. I broke my wrist when I was 21, and I tore my ACL when I was 9. That’s it. For the past six weeks, I’ve been walking around in Sling, a giant black two-piece Velcro-and-foam ensemble that both holds my right arm and straps it to my waist. Judging from how much people avoid me in public places, there might not be anything more spectacularly invisible than me in Sling. Walking into Sephora or American Apparel, I feel as if I ought to wave my debit card while shouting, “I have a $1,200 balance and I’m not afraid to spend it!” Anything short of that makes salespeople’s eyes slide off me like I’m coated in Teflon. Ditto those of my fellow consumers.

But Sling, which ruins the lines of my clothes and marks me as invalid, is not the worst of it. The pain might be the worst of it. For six weeks, I’ve been in near-constant pain. Sometimes the pain has been such a great and keening beast that I cower and go fetal. Most times, the pain is a low susurrating animal, like a mewling rat. It hurts, and it’s exhausting. I went a month not sleeping more than two hours at a clip. Now I’m sleeping as long as my Tylenol lasts, and then I wake. I count Tylenols like coffee spoons.

Actually, no. The worst of it is the envy and the longing. I watch people with their hands in the air, waving them like they just don’t care, and I marvel. I recollect the ability to wash the top of my head, but it’s probably a month away before I’ll be able to do that again. I crawl like a toddler toward a full range of motion. I was overjoyed when, for the first time three weeks, I was able to apply eyeliner. Some day soon, I’ll be able to put my hair in a ponytail without bending over at the waist. I hear that one day I’ll do a push-up again, but that day is about six months away. I mourn.

I miss feeling whole, hale, and healthy. Mostly, I miss the fact that I can no longer, not ever, treat my body cavalierly. I will never, ever be able to slam weights around like a fucking Marine. I’ll never be able to dive in all commando and, as I did when I began running, go out and do the six-mile Central Park loop just to see if I can. I can’t be Cock-D. I have to work slowly, incrementally, pussily. I have to pay attention to my body, listen to it. I hate that. I feel like a schnook.

I age and that’s interesting, but I’m not young anymore and that’s not. I hear there’s wisdom as pay-off for this necessary winding down. I have yet to appreciate it. All I want to do is jump rope as the Ramones blasts in my earbuds and my breath catches and my quads burn and gorge rises. All I want is to push my body with Spartan abandon. All I want is to be able to hug fiercely and long. All I want is to be me again, and that’s not possible, not as I have been. I may be more than my pained, healing, and afflicted shoulder, but I’m not sure who that is.

There has been a split far larger than the two tiny scars in my shoulder would suggest. Time will not heal the rift; it’ll only make it larger.

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Comments

[Dave]

I have some bad news: It gets worse.

[Lady Dragonfly]

An older man I met had just gotten out of the hospital. His wife was there, too--and she ended up in a short-term rehabilitation hospital after that, she was so sick. And he hurt.

"Getting old isn't for sissies!" he told me. And I believed him. He told me that he had been sick for a long time when he was a boy, spent a month in the hospital way back when. But it was nothing like getting sick now, at ninety years old.

I think about this a lot... And I think about this, too: your invisibility when visiting the mall with Sling is just a symptom of other people's fear. Fear of imperfection, perhaps a fear of death--not that you are dying! But somehow we have a hard time accepting that illnesses, loss of abilities, are normal in life at some point or another. I think that it reminds us that our bodies are only temporary.

I hope you heal quickly and well, hug fiercely, and long, and soon.

[Raj]

missed you on these pages.

[MikeNSanDiego]

As someone who has spent the last 10 weeks recovering from multiple successive respiratory issues, I can somewhat commiserate. This week marks my second week back in the gym, and even I have so far to go. If I push to hard I feel my lungs tighten and my breathing rasps and I know I have to stop. I hate the feeling of not being in control of my own body. While I know I'll recover in time- I can already tell that as I've gotten older it takes longer and longer to regain that lost ground. Maybe one day that wisdom will make it around to me too.

PS: Love reading your posts- it's vocabulary lessons and life lessons all rolled up into one. You make me think and that's not a bad thing at all. Stay with it!

[Pete]

CG,
As someone currently recuperating from sciatica, I can empathize. Getting older is a bitch, but when healthy, it is hard to remember to go easy on ones body. Get well, keep writing the wonderful prose.
Pete

[SF Sex Toy]

Wow... What a soulful post. And yes... You are still young and hot!

[sera]

Beautiful picture, beautiful writing.

[Juliett]

CG,

It's nice to see you back in long-form. I've missed you.

Juliett