Hello,
I’m back and I bring. new. toys! Read through to check them out (or click each word above).
This week, I’ve been sharing my thoughts about women in the world of work, editing and getting to know the community at Compound Writing, and really enjoying and learning from this piece on Cultural Appropriation by non-profit Studio Atao that I helped edit. I also just started a course on bodies, and I have so many thoughts on that, but more on that (and a chance for you to tell me what to write about) below.
New around here?
Welcome! I'm Nanya, development economist, poet, wanderer. I write here and there, take photos, build data models for equitable policymaking. My home on the web is here (my home on the earth is a bit more everywhere). You can learn more about this newsletter here. If you got this from a friend, consider signing up!
On bodies
Hi, I'm Nanya, and I'm learning to be in my body.
This week, I started a course called On Body, a dance-forward philosophical approach to learning more about the body in its forms and our interaction with it. I enter it trying to learn more about our own personal relationships with our bodies - how we see them, how we interact with them, how much importance they have or don't have in our everyday lives, and whether they are the central character or just a prop in the art we make. I hope to ask all this and more of my own relationship with my body as I learn to live in it.
In so many ways, my body has taken up so much space in my head over the past decade. Deciding what to feed it so I can feel at one with the fishies and plants, learning how to move so I can chisel my abdomen into chocolate bar abs and put some muscle on these skinny arms, discovering the power of rest. Finding my way, so slowly, to being ok with my hip dips and lightness of chest, with my panda eyes and monkey teeth. Learning how to heal what my random late twenties acne portends. Mapping out what gets it all wound up and makes it all tick, tock, work around the clock.
In some ways, it's a perfect time to start a course about bodies. Four weeks ago, I started a pill that put me entirely out of touch with the body cues I have worked so hard to get to know over the past few years. I’m off it now, but oof, did that hit like a brick. Bloating, fullness, acne, mood swings, fuzzy head, and the distinct feeling of being in a straitjacket in my own body. A slow, month-long nuclear explosion of my perfectly calibrated routine with my body, tugging apart our still very new ok-ness with each other and pushing me a little more into a playpen with my own black dog. Hello, depression, old friend!
Why am I telling you this? Because this is not a singular experience. Because the side effects of medicines are not normal. Because we are still not talking enough about the impact of the pill (or other hormones) on women's everyday functioning, on their ability to work, on their personal relationships, and most personal of them all, on their relationships with their own bodies.
Millions of women go through all sorts of frustrating and inscrutable changes when they are put on hormones, and so much of publicly available medical research denies the statistical significance of these symptoms. Apparently, it's ok to put women through debilitating mood swings, headaches, and nausea, all life-sucking, joy-warping conditions, for the first four months of being on the pill, and then call them hyperbolic, hysterical beings. Apparently, depression is not counted as a symptom of the pill, even though so many women suffer it. It's 2021, and we are still not making enough space to talk about this freely in public discourse. It makes me so mad.
You may already know this. You may even be infuriated by it. Or maybe you just don’t care. Well, especially if that last one is you, I’m asking you to build some more empathy and work towards holding space for conversations about bodies, especially women’s bodies, in your lives.
Bodies are weird. Bodies bleed. Bodies hurt. But bodies also tell us what’s going on around us and how it may be affecting us. Bodies are the most visceral way we express love. And bodies find their way back to balance when we find a way to be with them.
During a pandemic, when the absence of physical touch leaves such a hole in some of our lives, my second ask to you is to take a moment to be with your own body. Do it every day. Learn to read the information it is giving you all the time (this is called interoceptive awareness). You are the only one with access to this treasure. You are the only one in the universe who knows how it feels to be you.
Learning to be in my body is one of the things that has helped me most in understanding myself and being present to process whatever is going on, inside and outside. And I have a million thoughts on the intersections of bodies, states of being, and identities, especially my own, that I’m hoping will be the work of future essays. (Would you be interested in reading that? Feel free to suggest what I should write on, body or not body.)
I'll keep you posted on my journey. I'm so far from being...there, but I think I am maybe just starting to enjoy it.
I leave you with this question:
What's your relationship with your body? Has it changed over the years? Is it true that we become more accepting of ourselves as of our bodies as we grow older? Do you see your body as its own willful creature or as something that you have a nurturing/symbiotic relationship with?
Reply to this email, share it in the comments, or click below to answer on this brand new tool from Palette.
Links and things
While you’re thinking about your relationship with your body, here’s some food for thought by powerful artist and advocate for marginalised people, Priyanka Paul.
[Text reads: “where Do I put my dissatisfaction with body? = there is no +positivity for my dissatisfaction | only for my -body”]
Here’s a quick exercise you could do to sense where you are in terms of interoceptive awareness:
Breathe in for a second and try to feel what’s going on in the fingertips of your right hand, in the toes of your left foot. Is it cold or warm, tingling or pulsing, or nothing? How does it feel on the top of your head? In the space beneath your earlobes? In the hollow of your chest? Take another breath in. Can you feel that? Can you feel your heartbeat?
To read more about interoceptive awareness, try this or this.
While we’re talking about senses, here’s a piece about trusting your sense of smell by Natalie Toren, whom I’m hoping will be my friend
“Sensorial pleasure is profoundly linked to scent. This you probably know if you’ve hunted down a special perfume, or stood beneath a jasmine bush or tasted offerings at an ice cream shop (where tantalising flavours are more indebted to their fragrance than most realise). Beyond providing or enhancing pleasure, however, the important role scent plays has been diminished in the vision of modernity we inherited. Just think of all the scentless hallmarks of technology we interact with regularly: audio, visual, and tactile--the internet, iPhones, VR—but none olfactive…But it would seem that outside of a cosmetic realm, our sense of smell’s utility is too ephemeral to be an organising principle, too subjective to be trusted.”
If you want to read more about women and their exclusion from the world in certain ways, there is a lot(!) out there, but perhaps you could start with Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Pérez, which I’m reading right now. Or Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly, which I’ve recommended to everyone in the past year. Or more on the topic of bodies and radical self-love, My Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, which I’m working my way through.
One last thing
I would love to know whether you’re enjoying this newsletter so far, whether it’s what you expected, and what you’d like me to write about. If you have 3-7 minutes, please help me out by filling out this form. Or just take twenty seconds to suggest what you’d like me to write about here.
The real problem of stand-up, of course, is that you must constantly justify why you are the only one talking while a room full of people sit quietly.
Jerry Seinfeld
So please don't sit quietly, write to me!