After forty years on the planet, you’d think I would be used to this. Public shame about my body. Opinions of strangers. The eyes. The laughs. The echo of car horns and abuse hurled from passing motors. That feeling of being overlooked or underestimated due to my size, or worse, being looked over and assessed and found wanting. Derision that seeks to and often succeeds in sending me into hiding. Into my mind. Into poetry. Into the safety of the lifelines I know best.
When it happens this time, I am in the gym. Trying to work my body how I work my mind. Progress curtailed. A curt remark from a woman standing over me, her body primed, eyes of thunder. I turn my burning face to the ceiling tiles, swallow my shame. In the leg press machine, I pull my knees to my chest, feel the glaring obstruction of my belly. She mutters something about a waste of time, hers and mine. She turns, retreats to her friends, communicates how my body is an obstruction. And mortified, I turn to finish my sets. I follow what I have been taught: exertion, repetition, let this action tear tiny slivers from my muscles so I will feel their repair for days. There is no graceful way out of a leg press machine, so I pull myself up and move gamely beyond the metal frame. God, I need to escape this place, this feeling.
I don’t realise it but this is the day my writing begins to sputter. As if it understands that a pressure valve has failed. That I am losing traction in this new world I’ve tried to build. My pen wants to write these difficult feelings, these shallow embarrassments—but I am afraid of my pen and its truths. I am afraid of the cost of writing the realities of my body. I am scared to be truly looked at, to be perceived for my obvious weakness.
At various stages, I have ballooned and reduced. I have seasons of beach walks and diets, eras of gym sessions and starvation. When I see myself in the mirror, it is to admonish. I have had periods of intense happiness and activity, I have had periods of stasis and depression. This feeling, though. The way my body can curl in on itself, my skin pink and slapped, my hearing underwater, mouth dry with no words of comeback to those who call attention to the ways I have failed myself. The kids on the avenue I grew up on were cruel, sometimes violent. I learned then how to hide my body behind hedges, how to time my movements to coincide with their absence. I knew to stick to my own end of the street, how to ignore the words they’d shout at me. The way their laughter barrelled around me. How was I so different? So incomplete. I learned how to construct safe territories for myself.
I don’t know if I will ever be brave enough to show myself so clearly, to write the ways I’ve failed into stanza and verse, to invite light into my darkest corners. Perhaps I shouldn’t draw attention to such a thing. I have spent the last fifteen years holding the lens away from my own body, writing instead about people I have loved, those I have lost. As I type, I feel that whirring tightness in my chest, see my fingers type out letters, so I can fulfil what I have promised. That this essay will reach a conclusion where my writing can sanitise and deflect. That somehow, I can hide the grubby realities that have burned themselves into the parts of my mind which I choose not to write.
This feeling of being trapped, of being caged within my own bodily reality: this is not what I want to write about. I refuse. These experiences will not make it into the world of my poetry, where I control the photography. At all costs, I must avoid drawing the focus to my own body. I will throw these new occurrences onto the scrap heap of memory, and with time gather enough tinder to set the pyre alight.
But this body of mine always has a way of asserting itself, of taking up too much space.
It was the work of my first two collections, The Road, Slowly and How We Arrive in Winter, to keep myself at arm’s length. Instead, I wrote about those I love, how they stay and how they go—I paint them clearly, precisely, leave the canvas to them. Nothing good comes from drawing attention to my own physicality, so occlusion is best. Stay back from the window, retreat into the greyest corner. The people I love are the beautiful parts of my reality, and I understand how to fall back into the spaces behind them. I know how to populate foregrounds with activity to shift the focus from myself.
In these early collections, how I existed in the world and understood myself was a choice. Poems were the spaces I felt safe to put my doubts, my subordination, my failings as the non-biological mother to my children. A list of all the things I have failed to do. This was a subjective space, a violence, that hindered my personal growth. Without meaning to, I used the poems in The Road, Slowly as sites of apology for the guilt I felt at not being the one to carry my children, a guilt that has only become clear as the acts of my life progress and recede.
I now see that collection as a chronicle of avoidance, a place where I moved myself out of focus, deferring to my then-wife and the biological necessities of childbearing. The message in the country at the time was that a second mother in a queer family did not hold the same gravitas as her heteronuclear familiar. Unknowingly, I took on that message. I wrote myself into the background, kept my body shrouded, only bringing it into the light to display as redundant and pointless in the building of my family. In essence, I had my own biologically-determined bias which positioned me in the background. The collection was another step along the road I’ve been walking since I was a child, head facing forward while keeping out of the way. The quiet, bookish girl in the corner, sidelined.
Write: home, daughters, marriage, breakdown.
Write: father, loss, family.
Write: new love, falling, how she catches me and saves me from myself.
Never: body, if I can help it. Never should my ink spread that thin.
Poetry has been my solace since those childhood days, my saviour in times where the terrain of my life has destabilised. As I write my third collection, my gay Stag’s Leap-divorce chronicle, the feeling persists that I can trust the art form as something revelatory, that by the act of committing to the page, some essential truth will emerge to explain the events of my life if only I have the courage to face those truths down. That the poems as units of language and exposition will allow my lived experience to be rendered in living colour. How else can I marshall memory? How else can I investigate the realities of a life undone and remade without drawing attention to the body that it has inhabited?
There is only one certainty now. I must reconnect my body to my mind, come to terms with the space I inhabit, how my body and I work in the world. The big question is how to write about this evolution. Do I admit my limitation, my dread? Do I admit such a basic flaw? Can I teach myself how to hold my body in focus without distorting the image? Can I write plainly about that which I’ve kept opaque? The years have taught me that I have only my own body to move around the pages. And I must meet it where it is: in flux, in love, in fear and uncertainty. So how do I do this? How do I write those spaces where my fears run riot, where the dark corners of my heart eclipse anywhere the light might illuminate? I cannot hide anymore. At this middle stage of life, I only have the image in my own mirror, a woman troubled, in love, remaking herself. This is a new era and I must embody it. The grief I own now is my own, it lives in my skin, in my very marrow. Most importantly, it lives in my ink, the words I put down on paper, sometimes subtextual, often subliminal, but present, ever-present, persistent now, and ready for the page.
It has now been two decades of writing, of living in this body as a writer, and I can admit that I have been a coward at heart. I know the more I write, the more I reveal. I look at myself differently, with pity, as if there is a state more vulnerable than naked. I wonder if writing this essay will change things, will push me to articulate what I’m afraid to say.
I wonder if writing this essay and allowing it out into the world is a step too far. Too public. Too open. Am I committing the cardinal sin of drawing attention to myself, to my bulk of brain and body? But I also wonder if this is a step I need to take. For the sake of the new poems, I need to move first into this new psychic territory. It is time to stop hiding all the disparate parts of me, to stop being afraid of myself and my truths, of my body and its failures and hungers. To allow my body to want and to be sated. To let myself finally step to the front without artifice, without armour. To let my poems see me as clearly as a lover, no distance, no distraction, nothing diminished.
Whether I like it or not, the poems have laid bare their demands and forward my pen must venture. The writing, an act as essential to me as breathing, beckons me with the urgency of an unfinished sentence. For better or worse, the poems will be written, from and of this body; and coward or not, realised and embodied, out into the world they will go.
***
This essay forms part of an ongoing series of reflections on the writing life edited by Olivia Fitzsimons.
Previously:
‘The Golden Pie of Literature‘ by Camilla Grudova
‘Days Left to Submission Deadline: Zero’ by Victoria Kennefick
‘The Waiting House’ by Marianne Lee