Your body is a person (and that person is good)

Or, some intention-setting, as we begin

Oh, hello! Welcome. I’m so glad to be here with you.

My name is Liddy, and there’s a lot I could tell you about me. I could tell you what I do for a living, what I do for free. Whom I love and exactly why.

But most important for our purposes here, I am a writer. And I am a body.

There are some things you should know about her.

Some of those footprints are hers

My body can’t think of a better smell than onions cooking in butter, except maybe her dad’s Christmas cookies cooling on the counter. She loves snuggling down with a heating pad on her back a 15ish-pound cat named Joni Mitchell sitting on her chest (if she so deigns to cease her string-batting and join her). She hates airplane seats with a burning passion but usually really likes the people she’s getting off the airplane to hug. My body will spend the first half of a run (read: brief, slow jog) hating everything and the second half thinking that she can do anything. My body will narrate words in her mind incessantly until she finds a way to sit in front of a blank page and get them the hell out.

My body once had scoliosis, then some surgeries. My body now hurts most of the time, sometimes a lot. Her upper back and shoulders hurt especially where her muscles are still learning how to live in community with some hooks, rods, and screws, even though they’ve been neighbors since she was a teenager.

My body cries about that sometimes. The pain, and the way it feels to be in the world in pain.

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You’ll notice I talk about my body like she’s a person. It’s because she is one.

(We will talk more about what wise bodies taught me to treat her that way.)

But this newsletter—and this life—is not just about how you’ll see me treating myself. That matters; of course it does. But that’s not the only thing that matters.

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Okay, I’m spiritually pulling up a chair next to you and leaning forward excitedly. You notice, when you see me, that I’ve got what is sometimes referred to as a “library tan.” My accent tells you that at one point I grew up in the south but then I met a bunch of people who didn’t. My shoulders roll in a little bit and my big hands are gesturing wildly.

Picture this, okay? You’re holding a tiny baby. Or, I guess, a kitten or a puppy, because after an informal poll, I’ve found that among the 20-something cis men I know, there is a serious dearth of baby-holding. (You mean nobody hands you a baby at a family gathering?!) Whatever.

"EXCUSE ME, MAY I HOLD THAT TINY BEING"

Imagine your tiny being. Imagine them laying across your chest. What does that feel like? When I picture it, they are warm and squishy and make little sounds.

(Just like you! Just like me!)

They are still and snuggly. They are breathing. They are fragile and precious and impossibly small. You would do anything for them. Seriously, in this moment, what wouldn’t you do for them? They need you. They can’t do any of this without you. 

And they are good. God, they are so, so good. 

They’re good even when they poop everywhere or even when they bite down harder than they intended because they haven’t intended anything yet, nothing at all. They have only breathed. But they are good. That much you know.

Okay, now, the same, but about you.

You were once that small. You once only breathed. And no one who loves you would have ever looked at you like you were anything other than small, and breakable, and precious. No one who loves you would have wanted anything but to keep you safe.

But Liddy, you argue, I got bigger. I made mistakes, big ones. I schemed and planned and hurt people and threw recyclables in the garbage.

So what?

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Look, you don’t have to be sold here. I get it; I really do. But I wonder what it would be like to pretend that you do believe that bodies are people, and people are good. To believe it: not in theory, but in practice.

The person sharing your elevator, the person who is just the worst at work, the person who you look at and think things about simply because of their body—what would it mean to see them, and to picture a body as purely good and worthy of love and support as a baby sleeping on your chest? And what would it mean to realize that that person is that baby, that their body is the same body? Just as good, just as worthy of love?

Or, I guess, a better question is: what would it mean not to? Is there harm in believing that the people around you are bodies, and bodies are people, and people are good? More harm than believing the bodies around you are not people, but things?

What would it mean to believe that the bodies murdered by empire, here in the US and abroad, are people, and people are good? What about the people locked away in prison just miles from where you sit? Or the person traversing treacherous desert to reach your country because putting their body in danger was exactly US policy, to keep them from getting here alive? 

What about even the people doing the killing, the imprisoning, the pushing, the dehumanizing, the deciding that some bodies get to live and some don’t? At the risk of humanizing the villain, I’m asking you to consider…humanizing the villain. Because I think it may help you humanize yourself. And that that might change our world.

What would it mean if my body was as much a person as your body? As good and as worthy of love as anyone—which is to say, infinitely good and worthy of love?

Take care, sweet friends.

Liddy

P.S. Next up in the queue (read: my unhinged Google Doc of running notes): “Why the pronouns?” And no, the energy I’m bringing to that is not uncle-at-thanksgiving, in case you were worried.