What is your body, was the question. So I wrote this: Torturer, my body is not kind or agreeable and has played the role of torturer and dream killer.

You hear people say this all of the time and it’s a concept I have been struggling with for quite a while now. Clearly the mind is housed inside the body, but for people like me, and for people like my friend Francis, the mind has not always directed the path that the body has followed.

This is very anti-yogic, from what I have seen. I have been sitting through these classes for a few months now, confused by the term because of this fact. It seems that people who are healthy cannot seem to wrap their brains around the idea that sometimes the body will fail despite whatever care and concern and focus your mind might be able to manifest through your mind. Included in this is the idea that there is someone essentially at fault for what happens to you, and that person is none other than you, since you are your mind and your mind is you. Yeah, yeah, that’s kind of a shortcut and probably not worded so efficiently, but you get it.

If I were to fully embrace this mind/body connection, then I would be forced to take responsibility for what has already happened to me. I know, some of you are screaming, but think about it. The thing is–I simply cannot take responsibility for my body’s failure at 19. My friend Francis was diagnosed with MS at a later age and had her share of shit she ate happily, and though I can definitely see where both of our childhoods encouraged us to be a little more independent, a little more isolated, and perhaps feeling a little less than fully loved or accepted (and in her case, protected), there was nothing either one of us did to perpetuate our own illnesses. We both exercised, never did cocaine or anything else even remotely hard (marijuana but come on now, let a girl have her relief), never were fat, never ate badly, never smoked much, and had the same hopes and dreams and aspirations as all of you did–to have a happy productive and hopefully drama-free adulthood given both of our childhoods sucked in their own ways.

I know, I know it’s not about fault, it’s about acceptance, but also accept it is my prerogative to tell you you are full of shit if you try and make me believe otherwise. She often has people give her their unsolicited opinions on having MS, quack cures, what have you, and for me, it’s never been about anyone telling me anything given I have never spoke to anyone who really had anything close to what I have had happen enough to empathize. Usually I get the empty oh my god how OLD are you, like my youth was supposed to exclude me from bad luck.

In fact, if I look back I can say the way I did survive is to largely pull my body out of the equation. I pulled all feeling and pain and stuffed it into the deep recesses of my mind and watched myself. I watched myself get fuzzy and hallucinate on morphine, I watched myself in the reflection of the TV, I watched myself out of my body as I laid there dying. My body had nothing to do with it, and if I can one day forgive it for punking out, for screwing me out of everything from being able to finish school in a regular timeline to screwing me out of ever having my own children, well then maybe one day my mind will be able to forgive my body. For now, I am going to try and treat it as well as I can even if just subconsciously hating it as much as I do.

And don’t get my wrong. I am thankful, I am beyond grateful I still have some semblance of body to try and build something from, but my body can largely go to hell (and it has gone there before without that utterance, so we’re cool calling each other names.)

***And as an addendum, let me add this: I know that the course of my day is largely dependent on a conscious decision to be happy, a conscious decision to allow light and happiness into my life. But I have always been a pretty happy little thing, so everything that’s happened since 1995, well it made no fucking sense. 1995 we can maybe lump in with the teen angsty my parents treat their children better than me reasoning that might have thwarted my heart’s development then. What about the other ones after that? There was of course a launching spot, a common denominator that preceded every single one of these surgeries, but you have to read my book to find out what that thing was. It’s juicy, trust me.