I have been failing to write this post for a few months now. I have been failing to post it for days. I have brought the blame of this failure from the matter of the post, the block in my writer-head is a matter of handling of the matter now. I handled it wrong; sometimes I held it too tight, too aggressively so its petals threaten to fall off. One time I held it so lightly, I hadn’t held it at all. So I let it be, till now, pressed between the cozy blankets of ‘it creates more problems than it solves’ and ‘it’s gross to talk about personal issues on social media.’ Till now.
Today at the beach, I couldn’t get myself to wear a bathing suit. If it was the cold stares of people, the shame of owning a body, I can’t say because they feel like the cause and effect of each other. My brain concentrated on the way my flesh must seem to people, “walk don’t run” and ignored my need to plunge into the sunset. I kept pulling at my suit, to maybe hide a few more stretch marks while the sunset-colored sea waited patiently for me.
In another ‘now’ a year ago, I was made to take certain photos of myself off of social media. Happy photos of me with my sister were interpreted as too much, unnecessary, and asking for trouble. The most hurtful thing was that it made sense. The girl from the ‘cover your neck when you bend’, ‘wear tights under your dress,’ ‘you are wearing a skirt and you haven’t waxed?’ had, in the encouraging space of my college, forgotten how the rest of the world looked at her body. Not nicely.
I had mixed up my tiny safe space of locked folders and college eyes that study gender, freedom, and the politics of it, with the trained and dangerous rest of the world. There was no clear distinction between the ‘your bra shows’ and ‘lovely color of bra’; till there was. And it felt like less of a trouble to make the boundaries between them thicker than to push them. Secret folders got passwords, social media got another level of filter. I learned to live with the split. Not to accept it, but to live with it. The implication of this, I hadn’t foreseen, till ‘now’ stretched: teasing, threatening, bruising, from the depth of my future throughout.
As these walls thickened, I stopped going to the beaches that needed me to wear clothes that clung to my body and felt heavy in the water and in my mind. I stopped dancing with my feet, which were lanky and stiff at the same time. I had always disliked my own body, but now I refused to open it to people. I started discussing with my therapist, increasingly, the physical problems that had stemmed in my relationships, since the first one till now. I had grown up observing unhealthy relationships, yes, dealing with it I was; but these factors that were without my body were easier to forgive than the ones betraying me from within.
The more we talked the more layers I unveiled: the transactional nature I had assumed in anything physical, the victimization of myself in the process, the raw anxiety from the past, and the disorienting shame of it all. I saw, I talked and the pile kept growing. My therapist told me to look at myself in the mirror carefully. I started following and reading people talk about body positivity and sex in powerful ways, which only made me feel more inadequate.
I took my inadequate being, in borrowed pieces of bathing suits, under the careful stares of people, to the beach. I walked into the water. The water has a way of making me lighter. In the water, the appendage falls away, floats far, and dissolves. I turn on my back, throw my hand and feet apart in carelessness, and float. My ears go silent but for the sound of the sea, sight blinded but for the birds flying past the sun. My body floats with the waves, away, out of my control, like it was meant to. Natural. And wild. Like was created. I am content, no stare, no expectation, no memory breaks the harmony. I spend all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half an hour as the sea.
And I decide, this month, to dance openly, go to the beach often, kiss more, and even tell. Because I wish someone told Prachi years ago of these wild, gross, public bodies that float and grow. So, here I am putting my face, with its imperfect jaw and body with the too bendy elbows on Instagram at least till I am made to take it down.