Corporeality is an exploration of my experience with chronic illness and the lifelong shame I came to associate with it. Immediately following a stressful major life event, I started to suffer constant, incapacitating gastrointestinal symptoms. I frequently felt an intense desire to rip out my insides to stop them from torturing me. That didn’t present a realistic option to me, so instead I stopped eating, and tried to exercise away any visible signs of the food I was consuming. If I eliminated food, I thought the pain of digesting it would go away. My direct environment, as well as a broader society, seemed almost completely to either ignore or to applaud the impact of malnourishment on my appearance. My visible thinness felt like a way to overcompensate for and deflect attention from the shame and social stigma of my invisible illness. If I were petite, delicate, and pretty enough, maybe people would overlook the unfortunate fact of my tumultuous digestive tract.
The eating disorder obviously didn’t make me feel better physically, and activated a host of additional problems, but it did provide me with the false confidence that I was taking charge against my illness, rather than submitting to it. I went from one doctor to another, got poked and prodded and medicated, and it made me feel overwhelmingly hopeless and powerless. No one could help me.
I was very lucky to have creative expression as a major source of comfort and catharsis. As a teenager, I mainly processed these experiences through poetry. It took me some searching, but almost 20 years later, I unearthed this poem from my senior year in high school:
This was one of the most expressively successful ones amongst the dozen or so pieces I found that either mention or center around physical distress, emotional distress, or some combination of the two.
until i am undone
it is unromantic to speak of or even to
acknowledge one’s bowels. mine, i think,
must be tangled and dense: gnarled branches of
sickly trees in a haunted wood. i dream of slicing a
pancake shape into my troubled abdomen, an exorcism
to free the tired spirits of my gut. tomorrow—
(let me borrow the weight of Macbeth’s word)
white-coated dwellers in dark laboratories will
develop fingers small enough to untangle my
antagonistic organs, and i will use my new dexterity (no
longer bound by my own woes) to enmesh our hands,
create a different kind of knot.
Over the years, I became accustomed to feeling unsettled and afraid. Even through all the medical evaluations, I’d received so little information about my condition or instruction on how to treat it. I unconsciously added “patient” to my list of personal descriptors, which was one indication of the severe anxiety and shame I’d developed surrounding my health. Illness felt like such an impactful part of my past and present. In retrospect, I’ve come to understand that this label may have also offered some reassurance. Approaching and entering young adulthood, I still had such an unsettled and insecure sense of identity; and there was probably solace in grasping onto any way to define myself.
That isn’t to say that my life wasn’t still bursting with profound privilege; I was able to pursue an art major at Brown. I developed the courage to start to externalize my situation by studying, replicating, and then creatively interpreting medical images of human anatomy. I found copying the intricate details and topological quality to be meditative, and was inspired beyond belief by the infinite shapes, patterns, and textures. There would be no end to the literal and symbolic potential of this treasure trove. I discovered so much relief and delight in uncovering this new ability; I learned to breathe life into a narrative about my early and perpetual exposure to my mortality. Illustrating the parts of my body that felt like enemies allowed me to get some distance from them, reframe them as beautiful in their mystery and fragility, and utilize their power in my life to give power to my art.
