Nearly six months ago, I was chosen to be the featured poet for an open mic that I frequented in Paris.

The implications of this would be that, as opposed to the poets on the sign up sheet, who would have 5 minutes to read, I would be given upwards of twenty minutes in order to showcase my work. I went in knowing that I had some ideological differences with the host and preparing myself for those to arise in some way.

Immediately before I was supposed to go on, a friend of mine had her reading slot. In support of me, she chose to read a piece that she had written for a project of mine called The Almanac of Bodies. The project was to collect people’s writing, chronicling their relationships with their bodies as guided by very loose questions. By reading the piece, my friend showed vulnerability to the audience, the sort of vulnerability that should be treated with respect.

After my friend, the host went up to introduce me as the poet and, referencing what my friend had just read, made a joke that he never noticed men thinking about their bodies as much as women. With a single condescending joke, he completely dismissed all of the courage it had taken to read the piece, and all of the important things that were happening in it. After he introduced me, while I was shuffling my papers in preparation of my reading, I remarked that the reason that I had started the project in the first place was because I had noticed that certain types of body awareness were forced upon specific groups of people. If women talk more about their bodies, it’s because they are forced to be more aware of them.

First off, I’m not going to buy into the generalization that men don’t think about their bodies. I know too many men obsessed with gaining weight in order to build muscle mass to think that that’s anywhere near the truth. But beyond that, my response to him has to do with something that’s been at the core of a lot of my thinking for a while. I touched a little bit on it in my analysis of diversity in the media. However, to elaborate further, my stance on body is that the relationship between the body and the self is one that is inescapable, as it is the singular relationship that is maintained for the entire duration of your existence. This is, of course, a rather atheist viewpoint as it defines existence as being bound within the limits of a mortal body. However, this aside, for the duration that someone exists inside a body, that relationship is crucial, whether they choose to embrace it, or practice active distance from it.

This idea came from a conversation that I had with a friend and fellow writer, when we were discussing the different ways that the body is negotiated through writing. I made a remark about how oftentimes it seemed as though women writers would write in a way that interacted a lot more with the body—the narration was conscious of it. Though this was a new thought to me, to my friend, it was something that was a bit obvious, and she pushed the conversation so that the thought expanded further. Not only was this the case with women writers, but also with POC, with transfolk, with differently abled people, with people dealing with chronic illnesses—the more that someone had been put into a position where they were forced to constantly be aware of their body, the more that relationship would appear in their writing. Furthermore, for many of these groups, the body-self relationship is something that needs to be grappled with because of its complexity—it’s hard to draw a defining line to separate the identity of the self from the body (that’s right Descartes, it is not something easily done), but at the same time, for groups of people, the body also becomes a site of trauma. Experiences like sexual assault can deepen this complexity. It is important to note that

I make broad generalizations that point to intersections of identity, because I would not be able to develop a theory otherwise, and there are important ways that identities influence the relationship with the body. However, I think above all, the most generalizable statement is that a relationship exists and that relationship is not generalizable. The different ways that people relate to their bodies are very specific and nuanced. That much is obvious even from very simple things, like the way people choose to dress themselves, or their choices of body modifications. Part of my hope with creating The Almanac of Bodies was to inspire people to investigate what it means to them to have a body. There are certain parts of that relationship that we might think about daily—strength, weight, proximity to a certain beauty standard, energy, health, but the relationship is one that should be investigated in its entirety, so that we might consider ourselves, but also so that might consider other people. Examining the nuances of our relationships with our bodies allows us to acknowledge our personhood inside of our body, and would help us be more aware of the same in others.

Below is the first entry of The Almanac of Bodies. If interested in contributing, contact me on my professional facebook, or just use the guiding questions for personal reflection.

Body 01

Content warning: self-harm, sexual assault

How would my body be written into paper?

-I am twenty years old

-It has been years since I have known my exact height but it’s somewhere between 5’4” and 5’6” and in eighth grade I was the tallest girl in my grade and the eighth tallest person

-I weigh 147 pounds, sometimes more, sometimes less

-My family on both sides is white European as far back as anyone can remember.

-I was born with blue eyes and then they turned hazel, and I don’t know if they’ve changed since then or if I’ve just called them green enough times that I’ve come to see them as green, not hazel

-I have been dyeing my hair blues and greens for five years and sometimes I forget that it’s not actually that color

-I was born with brown hair, but I guess all parts of me must someday evolve into green

-I was designated female at birth

What have they said about my body?

- “it’s odd, I’m usually attracted to skinny girls”- The first person I ever loved

-I have never been skinny

-”Hey, vanilla, how you doing? You so spicy!”- a man in Washington heights

-”cut me off a slice of that cake”- man on the subway

-I have never been a baked good available for consumption

-”You have child-bearing hips”- my mother

-I never want to bear children

-”If you were to ever get plastic surgery, you should get a boob job”- the first person I ever dated

- “Wow, you’re stronger than you look” -many people in my life who have thought that I could not lift the burdens/boxes bestowed upon me

-”Can I take a picture of your feet? You have dancer’s feet” -a man in the park, three months before I started dancing

-”I like your feet because they seem real”- my friend

-”Why do you hide your looks with such weird clothes and hair”- members of my family

What do I keep/change/love/hate to turn my body into something that I can see as mine?

-I used to have bangs to cover the acne on my forehead. Now I just have them because my face wouldn’t look like my face otherwise

-I like the way that sun tan lines will look on my body and sometimes in the summer I’ll wear things with as unusual straps as possible just to get a new set of lines

-For three weeks, I have had tan lines from my flips flops and I don’t know if it’s tan or dirt

-I have issues loving the parts of my body that are soft because, though in other people, physical softness and internal strength are two things that I don’t see as being at odds with one another, they are things that I have trouble reconciling in how I see myself

-I hated the way my ears looked on my head until I got piercings

-I like my stomach more when I have a belly button piercing

-I have pierced nine holes in my body (four of them were repiercing the same spot)

-Two months after I turned eighteen, I tattooed a tiger on my shoulder, chasing a demon out of circle, so that I could touch it and think about strength

- A year and three months after my first tattoo, I got a second one on my ribcage, of a sunflower that turns into a dragon, because looking at sunflowers makes me happy and I was starting to forget that there are good things inside of me

- My favorite mole is the one on the inside of my right thigh

How have I hurt?

-9 months ago I spilled acid on my knees in a lab accident and the doctors say that the burn covered 2-3% of my body, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but they kept me in the ER for 24 hours because there was a large chance that I would have nerve damage or that the acid would work its way through my bloodstream to one of my vital organs (it didn’t)

-If you look closely, you can still see the scars on my knees from the acid-- they turn red under extreme temperatures like the heat of the shower.

-It has been four years since I last cut myself

-I used to cut, in exactly perfectly parallel lines, on my left hip, on the left side of my ribcage

-My sunflower tattoo sits right above where there used to be healing scars, someday when I find something that means enough, I will tattoo my hip as well

-There have been times when people have decided that my body is more theirs than mine, not once, or twice, but many times over again

-My body is not theirs

-There were times when I would kneel in the shower because I wouldn’t have the energy to stand anymore, and I would feel the water calling out in drops the names of my vertebrae

-There were times when I tried to drown myself

What does it mean to have a body?

- I feel my depression inside my rib cage and it feels like creeping, dripping darkness

-I feel my anxiety in my ribcage and it feels like a fluttering bird trying to force its way up my throat

- I feel my stress in my shoulders, my jaw/ I feel my stress in my brain and when I get overwhelmed it feels like a giant mechanized claw is gripping it tighter and tighter

-I was born almost a month premature (my brother was born almost three)

-I hate reminders of the physical limitations of my body

-I love to dance

-I love to dance on the days when it feels that I can control exactly what shapes my body makes

- I love to do archery because my muscles stretching back in just the right way can cause precision and destruction and I like the idea of controlled destruction

- I slept on my side or on my back until I was 14

-Now I sleep on my stomach

-As I go about my days, I’ll sometimes forget to eat and I’ll forget to sleep and I’ll forget that my body is not run off of my willpower alone

-sometimes I forget that medicine works because it seems absurd to me that my body is a physical object/can be affected by something other than my mind

-I love to stretch out my body and think about every muscle in it that is moving

-In the moments that I am ok with being touched, I love when people lightly touch my skin/ I love to touch my own skin and feel what shape I take up in the universe

-I do not like being tickled/ do not like feeling out of control

-Sometimes I will remember to relax all the muscles in my body because they are an extension of my mind and sometimes they tense so tightly that it feels like they might snap