Sometimes a cliché gathers power when you think about it — like a classic painting, never properly observed. “Every cloud has a silver lining” is a lovely image — unseeable because of rampant overuse.
To feel “uncomfortable in your own skin” is often used to mean feeling uncomfortable with yourself. But it can also mean being uncomfortable in your physical self — a more direct and visceral experience.
From between the ages of about eighteen and twenty, I would have loved to step out of my skin — to slip across the world without physical encumbrances. Body dysmorphia is not just being unhappy with how you look. That’s part of it, of course, but it isn’t all of it. It’s also being repelled by how it feels to be embodied.
The Metamorphosis is not reducible to this but I’m sure it was an influence on Kafka’s understanding of Gregor Samsa’s “pathetic and repulsive shape”. Why does Gregor retain such composure when he wakes “transformed…into gigantic insect”? Because he had felt somewhat insectile all along.
When I was developing anorexia, I had an acute sense of my own fleshiness. It was like wearing baggy clothes that couldn’t be removed. I remember sitting in an A Level exam and finding it impossible to focus on the test because I was so deeply and distractingly disgusted by myself. Corporeality was experienced as a kind of nausea.
I’m not even sure if I thought I looked fat. I felt fat — and, in being so, worthlessly toadlike. There is an aesthetic element here, but it is also the rest of the internal being projected outwards. “I cannot overcome my loneliness, my fear, my disgust,” wrote Sarah Kane — a writer, like Kafka, whose sense of humour lurked within their sense of the morbid — in her play 4:48 Psychosis, “I am fat.”
Anorexia is associated with a particular kind of body dysmorphia. Some people have the opposite — they feel small and weak despite benching four hundred pounds and being the size of a rhinoceros. In my unlettered opinion, different forms of the condition feed off similar neuroses — a sense of corruption, a desire for control and a puritanical longing for an ideal. Both are entropic — aimed (unconsciously, in general) towards disintegration as a consequence of excess enlargement or contraction.
There are always risks in writing about past experiences. One tends to be claiming both exclusive insight into a condition and the wisdom of transcending it. Yet the former must dilute the latter. In sobriety, it is impossible to quite remember how it feels to be drunk.
Still, the creeping, crawling memory of the condition — the residue of which will always lurk at the bottom of my consciousness — inspires a few broader observations.
Self love is often mooted as the alternative — “body positivity”. This has always struck me as being like trying to avert depression by telling everyone to feel happy with their lives. It insults the body and the spirit — the body, inasmuch as it collapses beauty into ubiquitousness, and the spirit, inasmuch as it reduces existential anxieties to the aesthetic. The extent to which I have escaped body dysmorphia is less the extent to which I like looking at myself than the extent to which I am glad and grateful that my legs can run, and my hands can write, and my lips can kiss, and my heart can beat.
Body dysmorphia appears to take different forms according to different times. To avert misunderstanding, I have no doubt that gender dysphoria is its own condition, and as much as I have firm, fairly predictable opinions on how some of our responses should be framed I have no deep insight into the condition itself. Still, I worry that the fashionable sense that existential anguish is being defined and solved on a broad and unprecedented scale will shepherd victims of different forms of dysmorphia and dysphoria towards one end in search of peace. It is difficult if not impossible to materially resolve irrational emotion, and while “your unhappiness makes sense and I have the cure” is not always an illegitimate claim it is always a dangerous one.
The future offers brave new means of changing our bodies, and, in doing so, our relationships with them. It may be simpler to transform them, in appearance and capacities, but perhaps at the expense of their feeling quite like ours. A relationship is the product of shared struggle, and of appreciation of parts becoming whole. If change is easily, externally implemented, we might have less attachment to our physical selves.
But there’s no point being evasive — we’d sacrifice that for freedom from ageing and the postponement of death. I’m sure I would as well. Even the weightiest of philosophical terms is doomed to disintegrate, rightly or otherwise, when faced with words like “cancer”, “dementia” and even “male pattern balding”.
An informal sort of mind-body dualism will always define our sense of self. Sometimes, our minds and bodies seem to dance as one. Sometimes, they seem to be trapped together like the characters in Saw. But there is no mind without the body. That is true in the obvious — though not trivial — sense and in the sense that the consciousness is so enriched by pain and pleasure — by smell, and sight, and sound, and taste, and touch, in all their vivid poetry.
Your former bodily dysmorphia.....you might find this an interesting read: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
Merry Christmas
BDS waxing philosophical. Love it.
This line was especially resonant:
"A relationship is the product of shared struggle, and of appreciation of parts becoming whole."