If I don't get agency over my body, it's one more thing these motherfuckers would get over on me. You take my freedom, you take my rest, you take my peace, you take my creativity, you take my time, you take my life. You don't get to take my body, too. Something snapped in me. - as written by me to a Sister Queen about my Exile tale
Somewhere in the course of having fibromyalgia for nearly half my life, I became very afraid. I mean, I have a lot of anxiety issues as you know, so this wasn't really that hard to add to the pile. I'm not sure if I became afraid of specific activities because I could flare or if I became afraid of my spoons suddenly just bottoming out and I would be stranded where ever I was and incapacitated. Either way, testing my body which had become a really unreliable host seemed like a piss poor idea. Like, why am I going to antagonize it when random things like stress, not enough sleep and the weather could piss it off enough not to function? I'm supposed to go out and do things to specifically aggravate it? Pass! (Unless it involved dancing late at night and drinking excessively as a twentysomething. That was obviously a much needed risk to undertake)
It took me so long to get to what I needed to survive. The right meds, the right amount of sleep, stress management. It's only been in the last couple years that I've started to gently and tentatively press at these boundaries. Nannying being so physically intensive along with crafting and shows helped a great deal. Working for a beautiful dietician who was also an amazing cook helped, as did going to Pennsic with my boy gang/hey girl hey gang helped too because I got to be much more self sufficient there than I usually do. This is another part of my exile that takes place in my body. I worked so hard to survive on so many levels that thriving never felt like an option.
Until now.
So, Sisters, you know how much I love, love, love words like "journey" and "transformation" about so many things. But, trufax, I freaking loathe that word family used about my body. It sounds like I'm doing this precious special thing and people who are not or can't are somehow lesser which just . . .chaps my ass on every freaking level. It smacks of being ableist and body shaming. I just can't can't can't. Which has also been part of my difficulty with this whole thing because I literally think in words and not images like 85% of the time. How can I do A Thing if I can't name a Thing?
Thankfully, a Sister Queen who has been a dear local friend of mine for quite a few years is doing the Experiment this year. Zhe says, Things aren’t instantaneous. They take time to plant, cultivate, water, grow, flower. It’s a motherfucking process. That is so much more accurate to my experience. A MFP implies: crying, unraveling, finding things out you didn't want to know, doing things you don't want to do. The other word family implies: dream journals, manic pixie dream girls, day dreaming and other things that don't make you want to stab yourself in the hand with a letter opener per se. Not my experience with body stuff. A MFP is much closer to my personal experience so that's how we'll be speaking of it. (Also, side bar, another dear Sister Queen is doing another loop through it and her head and her heart is exactly where mine is currently which is why we're friends, also she's actually able to articulate it presently unlike me)
