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About a month ago, I came across this Letter to my Body from Blogher, inviting me to write a letter to my body. It was then I applied to be a volunteer to Blogher '08, because I could smell San Francisco while reading the post, evidently. Any excuse for San Francisco ...
First off, I didn't know my body was even WANTING to receive a letter from me, since it seems we live pretty close together, and why not save on the stamp? Specially since me and my body spend so much time on the Internet - going to all the same places together - in this day and age ...why would I want to snail mail a letter to my body? Besides, wouldn't that be adding insult to injury - the very fact that this body still remembered what snail mail even was ... was exactly why I wanted to avoid my body in the first place. Cause in the last year, this body turned 50. I wasn't liking it turning 50, because my mind felt like life was just beginning again, with all the wisdom gained in the last 20 years. I'm going to write this as it comes out of my head - no censoring, so it'll be all over the place. Hopefully, it'll make sense.
For most of those years, me and my body had a truce. I would leave it alone if it would leave me alone. I pretty much ignored it.
By virtue of being a girl, my body garnered me unwanted attention from inappropriate adults when it was a child. A grade-school janitor molested it when it was in 2nd grade. A baby-sitter when it was younger. A father when it was a teenager. Those are the memories my brain knows for sure. There's another shady memory of pine trees and a cabin in the woods, but my brain has never been able to trust my body, so we're not quite positive on the cabin in the woods incident/s. Just as well, as remembering what I did remember got me dis-owned by the people who were closet to me. Thanks, body.
Later, when dating boys, I panicked at the thought of physical contact. If a boy complimented me on something I wore, I wouldn't wear it again, not understanding why it made me feel dirty. I remember feeling self-conscious about EVERYTHING, including wearing a swimming suit at age 4 and 5. I hated family reunions, because they didn't feel safe to me, and someone was always critical about something on my body ... either my own embarrassment over my clothes, or a grandmother's criticism about the acne on my face. In front of everybody. Or my father's teasing about my "itty bitty titties". In front of everybody. I had a VERY good-looking cousin, who was VERY popular in my school, and it was excruciating for a teen girl to be singled out for critical attention in front of him - as if my body belonged to others to comment/criticize.
I didn't date because going thru the discomfort of getting to know someone new was too dangerous. So I stayed safe with one boy all thru high school and 2 years after. I believed I shouldn't sleep with him in order to be a good girl, and that's what I thought was expected of me. After 4 years of going out with him (I think it was 4 years), my mother asked me if I needed birth control, and I was shocked at the question. I think she said something along the lines that she didn't know how I could wait that long. That nite was the first time I had sex. I don't remember it - except for the embarrassment that he went down to the barn to get some Vaseline, and his best friend was there milking the cow, and he knew what was going on. And I remember being relieved - finally we could quit fighting about the "make-out sessions that never lead to anywhere". For 4 years, I had been a good girl, mostly because I was terrified of crossing that line - as long as we didn't have sex, that meant he loved me for my mind... right?
I know now that the reason I don't remember anything about sex in those early years is because I disassociated in order to get thru it. Sex also hurt because I tensed up so much. I thought something was wrong with me. My body
