My body is not my own.
It belongs to the makers, the producers, of the images that I eat.
It belongs to the friends I imitate, the loved ones I emulate, the people I respect, and admire, and to those I love. Above all, it belongs to them.
It belongs to all who’ve touched me (it doesn’t matter where: my heart, my mind, body and soul). It belongs to the lovers I’ve taken or, me, like meat, those who’ve taken without asking.
It is built upon the stories and memories I treasure and despise, cemented by careless compliments, loose lips sinking ships, careless criticisms, cutting.
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What’d I’d like to do, then, in this space, in this moment, is to create a new body, with you, a fictional one only insofar as it’s a composite and couldn’t possibly exist outside of this chance, beautiful gathering but as real as each of our bodies are. And I think, I hope, it’ll be clearer at the end what I mean.
I’ll start, and I invite you to join me in sharing the stories and feelings I know all of you have rattling around inside of you, about individual body parts.
Anyway, I’ll start. This is how I feel about my neck:
My Neck
Striations, stretch marks, like chokers around my neck, the necklaces I don’t want to wear and can’t take off, imprints of weight gain from puberty and binge eating and stress.
But that’s when I look at it as an object, when the truth is, I like it better as a subject, the recipient of gentle pecking kisses or violent, needy lip-caresses. I love that it feels so intensely and allows my head to turn to take in the world, that I can dress it up with necklaces of my choosing, even though the necklaces that are not, are there, too.
In reference to the body outline, now covered with arrows and associations
This is a person, not just complete but whole. Whole because it’s brimming with life: It is the intersection of and accumulation of unique and beautiful and beautifully unique experiences, and that’s what each of our bodies is, what this community is. It’s whole in a way even the disabled or the limbless can be whole, because wholeness has nothing to do with the physical: Each of us is so much greater than the sum of our parts.
I am more whole than the parts of me that I hate. I am me and I am more than me and I want to make a promise to you, to myself, today and I’m going to ask you to make the some promise to me, to yourself, today, that you will stop letting the marketing managers, your partners, your friends, or parents, your enemies, strangers and strange men, make you any less than what you are, because right now, you’re already, have always been, and will always be just perfect.
