For the month of December, I participated in a writing challenge called #DearBodyDecember. These are a few of my favorite prompts from the challenge.
Day 1: Write a Letter to your body.
Dear Body,
I was twelve years old when I decided I would not let you be delicate. I would not let you be tiny. Instead, you would be strong. You would shine so brightly you’d blind people. I made that decision for you when the roller skates were put in a box and forgotten when my family moved us into the desert where there were no long stretches of pavement upon which to skate. That is where I found running: the sport that created, destroyed and created me again and again for years (forever), like a gigantic circle, like my gait on the red oval track, where you’d run around and around my memories, simultaneously feeling and numbing yourself to them.
This was not when you were my gymnast’s body, so much younger than the other girls in our level, who made fun of how small you were because you hardly grew from the time you were four until we quit gymnastics when we were ten. This was not the version of you, body, that danced on a competitive dance team for high school students when you were only fourteen years old, who won a national title with that team even though you were technically too young to belong. It was not later versions of you, versions that people wrote on, inscribing meaning on your muscles, your bones, your skin, your fat: the girl-body who won state in the pole vault the first year they opened the competition to high school females in the state of Nevada. The girl-body who won a powerlifting contest, a pie-eating contest, a cross country race. The body who would turn itself inside out, self-mutilation, self-actualization, full or empty—or both—to win.
It was all the ways you, body, could be harder and more angular than you really were. To be more, to be less, to be bigger, smaller, rounder, untouchable, sharp, malleable, penetrable, coated in armor like an armadillo, endlessly shape-shifting.
You found yourself, body, when you slipped away from the darkness of home and into the light of the performance stage where whatever uniform that covered you could speak for you, define you, make you whole and beautiful and strong. And the applause of the crowd that washed all over you, bathing you in their applause, filling the empty caverns where you kept the loss of your mother's love, the step-man who named you, the no-body you turned into at home, that seeped throughout those vessels, becoming a vascular truth that you circulated no-thing.
But when you are 38, body, you remember those old roller skates. And one early dawn when you turn in a giant circle under the sun that crests the horizon turned red by summer wildfire, you remember that perpetual becoming of circles, of the way life creates, destroys and creates us again and again for years (forever.)
You felt born again under that red light, and I read to you something Glennon Doyle wrote in her book Untamed: “I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution,” she wrote.
In so many ways, body, you have always and never stopped becoming, turning in your own perpetual revolution.
R
Day 2: Look in the mirror for three minutes and write afterward to process.
Today when I look into the mirror, I see myself: the scars from acne long ago, the sun damage like dappled light across my cheekbones, the baby fat that melted away from the structure of my face, making it more angular than I remember from my childhood. There are streaks of happiness and frustration creased into the skin where the pressure of those emotions made imprints, like fingerprints, across my body. Until today, I assumed there would always be two halves in my life: the years in which I looked in the mirror and saw myself, and the years that followed, when I look in the mirror and see my mother staring back at me.
The first time I saw her face and not my own was my second year into a graduate writing program in the Bay Area at Saint Mary’s College of California where the bell tolls from the chapel which sat at the campus center could be heard every hour, on the hour from the white, stone mission-style buildings with the red tile roofs.
It was in the middle of a three-hour writing workshop and we were on a ten-minute break. I had just stepped out of the bathroom stall and the afternoon light streamed through the clouded class windows, and I caught my own reflection in the mirror mounted almost too high above the white sink.
My hair was streaked with blonde highlights and cut in a a short bob. When I met my own eyes in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the version of myself staring back it me. It was as though it wasn’t me. It was my mother and her hair, which was perpetually “frosted” had those light blonde streaks, cut into a short bob.
I gripped the sink for balance as I stared at this image of myself that was not myself so much as it was my mother. For all those early years growing up, I’d wanted to be her. And, after all those years of being me— failed versions of her, I believed— the traumatizing realization of this inevitable reality was deeply unsettling.
I went back to the writing workshop with a dazed feeling, like I was hovering somewhere above the classroom space, over the words about form, structure, organization and voice. On my drive back to my rented cottage from campus, I stopped by the local grocery store, and bought the darkest brown hair dye I could find.
The image of my mother met me in the cramped bathroom of the cottage where I lived that year. The cottage sat some distance behind an old estate in a forest of oak trees next to a meandering creek. It was dark and quiet all around.
And in that dark and quiet, it was as though I became my mother—all of her, all of that past and our past— and I wasn’t ready to. I mixed the cocktail of chemicals of the hair dye into the clear plastic bottle and draped a towel around my neck. I held the bottle high above my head, and poured the thick, black liquid over my head like syrup.
As the sludge slid down the top of my head and hair, tears fell into the sink next to the droplets of that black. Hours later, when I was done, I was unrecognizable, even to myself. One might say: a stranger.
Years later, that dark, strange version of me came back to my hometown, and I began the process of becoming yet again, something closer to the truth. Little by little, the dark brown was trimmed away, and the blonde streaks returned, where they stay, stretching down the length of me, and who I have become.
Day 3: Write a love poem to your body.
My an(atomic) love starts on a summer’s day
When, after work, I’d grab the long stretch of road to the mountains
Slip into my wetsuit with the granite sand beneath my feet
Dive into the mountain lake to swim its length
Until the sun sank beneath the peaks, turning the water black like ink.
It is the wind across my face on a 200-mile ride
Just me on the saddle of my bike and the endless circles
Of my feet clipped into the pedals of this machine
Riding from pre-dawn and into the darkness of night.
It is the miles I ran wild and free and alone through the heat and cold
Rain and snow, feeling my heartbeat in every part of me
Through misty forests, dry deserts, coastal plains
My runner’s high like an albatross, soaring—high.
I wrap my arms around all your verbs, body—
Transitive or not—centered around the nucleus of being alive
That hold these swirling electrons of possibility
In this dance with life, when by some miracle
You become more than the sum of your actions and parts
To the steady beat of your brave heart.