Meeting the body, meeting the work
Didion's migraines, Kathy Acker's muscles, getting comfortable with failure
This week, I’m assigning this great essay by Joan Didion to my Stanford students (an incredible group btw). We’ve been talking about narrative personas and what binds a memoir, but this essay is one I recently rediscovered and it’s such a wonderful demonstration of writing about low-grade ailments of the body—something I’m thinking about a lot lately as I struggle with hip pain and ongoing thyroid issues and the general having of a body and the seemingly unliterary and unextraordinary quality of my physical experiences.
I’ve been trying to write about the thyroid thing for some time. Mostly I’ve been blocked by time and paid labor, rather than by the writing itself. But it’s bloomed a fascination of mine: the way we see our minor pains or illnesses as, in Didion’s words, “a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.”
The older I get, the less I believe in wrongthink, or “bad behavior”— a phrase I see tossed around a lot lately in critical works, mostly uncritically. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t always paranoid that I’m diseased by it.
Naturally, one of my kids is throwing up today, so I am home with said kid today, and thinking as I often do about these private struggles. My brain has been foggy for weeks, I think because I’m still recovering from the book, or my thyroid, or witnessing genocide, or Covid, or 2020, or watching too much true crime, or the internet, or neurodiversity, or years of overwork, or girlhood, or a more vague existential depression, it’s hard to say.
One of the practices I’ve always called on to “fix” my lack of cognitive clarity is exercise. I am looking forward to reading this (and to this series by
)— it made me think of a classic essay by Kathy Acker on bodybuilding.
Acker writes that she failed to write about bodybuilding many times. I’ve been thinking about different ways of working with students who doubt whether they can write what they want to write and of communicating that this pain is a bedfellow we have to get used to as writers.
For Acker, though, the issue isn’t just one of confidence. It’s that her experience of bodybuilding evades language. She eventually realizes and writes that bodybuilding is itself about failure. This is how a muscle is built, strengthened.
“I want to shock my body into growth,” she writes. “I do not want to hurt it.”
It’s taken many years for me to even begin to unpack my own fucked-up relationship with exercise— what it felt like growing up in 90s Los Angeles in a family and a culture who unquestionably understood thinness as a moral good, as rightthink. It’s another thing I’ve been trying to write about, but haven’t yet. Lately, I’m trying to unpack what I do when I lift weights, run long distances, think I should run longer distances, don’t run at all, forget to eat amid all this, until my joints hurt and I’m fatigued, until I recommit myself to some new program that might order all this, this being my body.
Acker writes that in her exercises she is trying to “meet” the body, a thing that can’t be controlled. I’m always struck by this when I read the essay, because I want to do it, but struggle: what’s the difference? where’s that line? But it feels like a perfect metaphor for writing, for trying to make sense of the world. We can choose to meet it, rather than control it. We fail every time. We build up some kind of muscle.