On Shifting Bodies and Selves
The small red scar on my left foot is new.
Sitting just beneath my pinky toe, it’s thick and a little raised—more pronounced than I expected it to be. “It’s a diving injury,” I would say if anyone asked, which they won’t because they’re unlikely to be looking at the top of my left foot. In reality, it’s a consequence of my restlessness, of my ongoing competition with myself; a need to be more, move better, to prove that my body and mind can work together.
In the backyard of a house in Yucca Valley, coyotes climbed over the pool furniture at night and left paw prints to find in the morning. Small lizards scuttled under my seat cushions, leaving me the task of shaking them down so I could sit and read without guilt. Insects swam into the pool, thrashing, not nearly grateful enough when I scooped them out without asking if they were poisonous. A desert recluse spider followed us in with the suitcases, wild and bouncing off the glass, angry at the insult of being carried outside. After swimming a handful of lengths one morning, I asked my husband to teach me how to dive.
I have always loved to swim. At home, I swim most days, either in the gym or the bitter sea. In the desert, the sun was already beating down, high and hot, and I was growing tired of cooling down with repetitive lengths. I had never bothered learning to dive, was only interested in being inside the water, enveloped by it, cutting through it like silk. Seeking refuge in the water was more important than how I got into it in the first place.
Plus, I had tried before, and I was bad at it.
He showed me, and I copied dutifully, first baby dives off a ledge just beneath the surface of the water. For the first time, diving made sense, on a physical level. He taught me to dive downwards, not aiming to swim across the surface of the water as I had been trying to do before. Something clicked, so I went one step higher, to the edge of the pool, looking down to gauge its depth as the water dripped off me, drying where I stood.
“You don’t have to do it if you’re scared.”
“I do have to,” I responded, and I dived, straight down just like he taught me.
Or so I thought. At the last second my fear kicked in, and no matter what my conscious brain wanted me to do, it decided we weren’t diving today. My dive turned into an underwater stumble. My ankle rolled and I scraped the delicate skin of the top of my foot against the pool’s aesthetically pleasing but not very smooth bottom. Blood blossoming, I felt embarrassed, as if I had failed. I was reminded, again, that I didn’t “have to.”
But I did. As the lizards have to hide from the afternoon sun, I have to move the body I was given. I became just another wild thing in the desert, pushing myself to bend into shapes that didn’t feel natural at first.
I was never interested in sports growing up, and as a consequence, I’m not very good at them now.
As a child, I played with nerdy boys that I met through a shared interest in playing Zelda and not getting beaten up. I always needed to move my body, so I climbed trees, skateboarded, dug around in the dirt. I was not like the girls who played sports, and during gym class I was a letdown and a burden disappointing a team I hadn’t asked to join. I was asthmatic, uncoordinated, and above all, very lazy. I didn’t enjoy moving my body like that, on cue; I only felt an unstoppable force inside my chest that prompted me to move at will when it was inappropriate. I fidgeted and walked and sought physical stimulation whenever I was made to sit still, but when it was asked of me, I couldn’t channel that energy into running around a dirty field.
My body never matched with what I thought my brain was telling it to do. It always moved slightly out of time, smashing into everything that got in my way. Every attempt landed me with another injury: a sprained wrist from the monkey bars, a grazed knee from falling out of a tree, a burn from attempting to iron. I didn’t know yet that I was autistic, that my body and brain weren’t properly integrated, didn’t send the messages to one another that they were supposed to. I was always in pain, and I didn’t yet know why.
All of this to say I was an indoor kid. When I was 10, my parents had to bribe me to take part in sports day with a copy of the Order of the Phoenix. I took part, I won nothing, and I dropped the book in the bath. The only thing close to a sport I took part in was skateboarding, but this was the early 2000s, long before its inclusion in the Olympics or recognition as an actual sport. It was firmly relegated under the status of “antisocial behavior,” and besides, I’ve never been very good at it.
The things I enjoyed took place inside, anyway: music, books, documentaries that made spurious claims about ancient civilizations. Being an indoor child suited me fine, but as a teenager I exercised compulsively, only to slice my developing body into even smaller pieces. I was an indoor kid, then an indoor teen with an eating disorder, then an indoor adult whose friends were only interested in live, loud music and drinking. I was content letting my skin fade and my muscles slacken.
But identity—how we see ourselves—is often slippery, a product of what we need, what we have to do. A person does not identify as mother because they want to, but because it is the facet of their self that takes up the most time and energy. It is how they’re seen by the most important people in their lives. I became a full-time writer in my early 20s, segueing out of bartending, the last place where I kept up some vestige of activity. I committed to a life hunched over a laptop, growing crooked and losing the muscle I had gained hauling kegs and moving furniture. I did not like to move my body. I did it only when I had to, or when it served me, like when there was a monastery on top of a big hill in rural Croatia. Movement was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Then my body started to move and shift of its own accord, tectonic plates bumping up against one another. The pain that had followed me since childhood metastasized, its source made visible to the surface. My shoulder popped out of the joint at will. My fingers dis-and-re-located. Every bone in my body cracked and cried out. One night I woke in searing pain, screaming aloud, and looked down to see my patella on the inside of my leg. The ligaments burning, I flexed my leg and guided the patella back onto its track, begging my soft tissue not to tear and my husband not to react to the body horror before him lest I lose my nerve.
This continued, worsening based on time, age, and other factors that seemed out of my control. My body weakened over the pandemic lockdowns, and when my rheumatologist diagnosed me with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I wanted a cure that doesn’t exist. EDS is a disorder of the connective tissue that often goes hand-in-hand with autism spectrum disorder, though I don’t know why—all I know is that it hurts and makes me feel decades older than the 28 I was when I was diagnosed.
Exercise hurt more than ever, but through some sick twist it was, supposedly, the only treatment. By making my muscles stronger, they might do the work my ligaments refused to, holding the joints in place. Friends with the condition recommended reformer Pilates, an activity that takes place on a machine that looks like it belongs in a BDSM dungeon. You pull on straps and contort yourself into different shapes that are harder depending on the amount of colored springs loaded onto the machine. It was invented by a sickly German called Joseph Pilates, but when I thought of Pilates, I thought of gorgeous, tan women with six packs who wore slogan t-shirts. I was not those women. I actually never met those women. Instead, in a few different studios, I found myself in company with older women, disabled people, and those whose bodies had betrayed them.
Pilates, to an unrefined body that had long only considered exercise to be punishment, was hard. I was moving muscles that I didn’t know I had. I learned that, due to my hypermobility, I needed to keep movements small, not give in to the schoolyard desire to show off all the weird contortions my body could do. I had a teacher who would tell me to “stop showing off,” and for once I listened. I learned to listen. I learned discipline. I learned that, by strengthening my muscles, they might do the work my connective tissue wasn’t capable of. I learned that I might feel better, that I might never see my knee on the inside of my leg again, but that it would take commitment.
I took to the challenge like the nerd I had always been, vying to become my rheumatologist’s best student. I committed, first to Pilates and then to anything that might move my body in a way I didn’t find boring. I remained uncoordinated, accumulating scars and injuries: from peeing in the bushes on a long walk, from tripping over in a lagoon in Iceland, from climbing out of the water and over the rocks in Southern Italy. I never got less clumsy, but I did get stronger, and I did get to see the look on my rheumatologist’s face when she felt just how hard my legs had gotten.
Despite my progress, I felt like a child having a tantrum, like if I only had to exercise because of my disability I would at least find a way to enjoy it.
“I’m a writer, so my ego doesn’t depend on being a great dancer,” wrote Eve Babitz in her 1999 book on partner dancing Two by Two. That gives her permission to enjoy it, but no impetus to be very good at it. Two by Two was Babitz’s final book, serving as a follow-up to her Black Swans essay “Tangoland,”in which she learns to tango across Los Angeles. Known for being a raucous hedonist and a groupie in the 1960s and 1970s, Two by Two is Babitz’s last gasp at being part of a social scene. The dance world of LA, be it two-step, West Coast swing or salsa, becomes another medium for her greatest skill: observation. Weaved throughout Two by Two is Babitz’s unique skill for anthropological study, for viewing humanity and understanding exactly why people do the things that they do.
In Two by Two, Babitz’s discomfort in her own body permeates the fun she seems to be having. Known for her knockout figure, she’s always been prone to referencing the fact that she is not thin. As a casual observer, I can’t think of a delicate way to say that she doesn’t have to be. She had huge tits and perfect hips. Nobody really wanted her to be fragile. But as a woman in her 50s, she’s more self-conscious than ever, grappling with her knees and her weight to move. She says: “floating is not a feeling I often experience in dancing,” but she does. Either lacking self-awareness or displaying it in abundance, she says, “People are afraid [to dance], they hate their bodies so much.”
Regardless, she embarks on a journey through LA’s night to delve into every partner dancing scene she can find, often with the most knowing person in that scene in tow. She is most compelling on tango because she seems to detest it, though she calls herself “ambivalent,” she is almost childish in her reproach. But she keeps on doing it, anyway, and is shown all the best places to do it. The Chateau Marmont and the Garden of Allah of her earlier work is replaced by dance halls where you can eat gumbo and meet the love of your life on your feet.
Two by Two represents Babitz’s final social gasp before the accident that most believe cleaves her life in two. In 1997, while lighting a cigar in her 1968 Volkswagen bug, she set herself on fire, accruing third degree burns and needing to relearn to walk. It is true, according to her cousin Laurie Pepper and author of Hollywood’s Eve Lili Anolik, who spent time with her in middle age, that she did become something of a cantankerous recluse after the accident that took what was left of her capability. But I was thrilled to learn through Two by Two that the accident did not mark the end of her dance career, but that her romance with dance got her through the torment of recovery.
In the epilogue of Two by Two, Babitz reveals that she is filing late. She talks about her reasons for writing the book and for pursuing dance, referring again to exercising in a gym as “suffering.” She writes that she thinks dance could solve any mundane issue, that “no matter how boring and tiresome these things were, all I had to do was go dancing.” “I thought once my book came out I’d be dancing not just every night, but everywhere,” she says, confessing that she harboured dreams of Paris, Japan, China. “At best I’d never get fat, I’d be dancing too much,” she hopes, forever fixated on the size of the body she moves through the world.
“Since I first sent these pages in, things have happened to me that would send a person who didn’t have dancing to look forward to into a slough of despond,” writes Eve before diving into the gory details of an accident all Babitz fans have read rehashed many times. She calls it the end of her “dance happy ending,” the realisation that it would take more than some aloe to get her dancing again. She tells her nurses in the ICU that she’s a dancer, that before this happened she was “strong” and “in shape.” She is able to avoid succumbing to terror “or whatever it is that kills people psychologically” not only because she has dancing to look forward to, but because she is now able to follow the lead of her care team.
Then, she takes us through the changes in venues that have happened since she wrote the first chapters—spots changing hands, gumbo privileges withdrawn, doors shuttered. But of course, all anyone wants is to know whether she danced again, whether the promise of falling into the arms of a partner really was enough to get her through having the majority of her body burned to a crisp. “One of the good things about being a dancer is that you can dance in your head, even if you’re in a hospital,” she writes, crediting not only dance but the book with the reason she survived: “Doing this book got me into such great shape, I managed to survive being half done in, half gone.”
By the epilogue, Eve stops being an observer, a person dabbling in dance as a way to put together a book or hear the local gossip. She is a dancer, one who lies in her hospital bed dreaming not of the day she will fuck again or smoke or drink or write or any of the things we might associate with her persona or identity, but dance. She does just that, going dancing with Maurice Schwartzman, the only dance friend who visited her in hospital: “and doing foxtrot, I can just about forget about it all.”
At the time of writing, Babitz feels her beauty is well and truly behind her, but it seems she cares less. Her hair is back brown, her body is scarred and changed. She is grateful for the excuse not to wear heels, and closes the book saying that the knee she had complained so much about is better after weeks resting in the ICU. “Since I am lucky enough, when I go dancing, to not be looking for anything but a dance, it doesn’t matter if my hair is no longer so neon it is bound to attract just anyone.” She writes that what happened in the hospital was bad, but “having something to look forward to made it possible to survive.” She describes the humiliation and varieties of spiritual despair that not the accident but dancing inflicted on her, making her the perfect willing victim for her physical therapist. “Moving across a bed, getting on a walker (!), that whole grisly and ugly bunch of stuff–all nothing having done salsa.” Eve is remembered as many things: a writer, a groupie, an artist. But it is her final form, her identity as dancer that kept her alive. It is movement that nursed her disabled body back to a state of health, back to being well enough that she could engage in the things that made her feel alive again.
My own flirtation with activities that could almost be considered sports began with a move to the seaside and a need to be alone.
I had previously been living in London, a place where the main activity is drinking and the closest I got to nature was a patch of grass behind my house. That would have been fine, except the patch of grass was always burned by barbecues and overrun with quad bikes and dogs the size of human men. I could always go further afield, but on nice days the parks were littered with people drinking, and I wanted to be able to touch nature, to be inside it. I wanted, more than anything, to be alone with it.
My new apartment was a 15-minute walk from the beach, with a distant view of the sea itself from my living room window. I saw it, every morning, and every afternoon I got close enough to touch. In the winter, there was nobody on the beach but me and a couple of old ladies sitting on folding chairs. In the summer, the beach was covered in people both from my own city and the one I had escaped, drinking and smoking and yelling, their kids throwing rocks at seagulls. They made loudspeaker phone calls and left their litter on my beach, the beach that had been mine for so many months before they landed, fair-weather beach enjoyers who only wanted to paddle in the sea or sit on the rocks when the sun was searing.
I sat on the beach, looking out to sea, wanting to find a moment of peace and quiet. I saw the paddleboarders, languidly cutting their way through the still water, and I got so jealous I wanted to swim out and push them off. I was already swimming in the sea most days, getting out as far as I could, far enough that the noise onshore became distant and warped. But I wanted my own place, a place to call my own on the water, an island made from PVC and air. The activity itself, the way my body would have to be able to move, was as always secondary.
In May of the next year, on one of the first warm days, I took a paddleboarding lesson at a local water sports center. Navigating my first wetsuit, I felt as if I was wearing a costume, a relic from someone else’s life. I looked around at the other women in the changing room, wondering if I seemed out of place to them. What I saw was a handful of adult women trying something new and helping one another–a woman helping another to tuck her hijab into her wetsuit, another zipping someone up. I had no reason to feel out of place, and I wasn’t any different to them in any meaningful way. We were just making room in our lives to move, to breathe fresh air. The bullies I had grown up with were long gone, and nobody was going to yell at me for letting the team down. Least of all because there was no team in paddleboarding. That was the best thing about it.
The water was full of moon jellyfish, a consequence of global warming. They were harmless, but as the summer went on, the sea filled with increasingly threatening jellyfish. Paddleboarding was harder than the relaxed people on the sea made it seem; my muscles ached, my arms barely able to move above my head the next day. I found, as the lessons went on, that it was this difficulty that I enjoyed, feeling as if I was getting stronger, as if I was the one making my solitude at sea possible. On a lesson out on the water, the sun setting, local teenage girls crammed onto one paddleboard laughed at us, at the idea that a person would need teaching how to do something that had been intuitive for them since childhood.
It never became intuitive for me. Partway through my first lesson on the sea, I got cocky, cutting through the water at speed, my eyes on the horizon as the teacher had told me. I was riding the waves, skimming over them, my rotator cuff and arm muscles working in harmony with the paddle.
Then I was under the water. The waves stopped working with me, and my confidence worked against me. I rose up quickly, clinging to my paddleboard and laughing. I had been so scared of falling off I had spent most of the lesson on my knees, but it wasn’t so bad. It was fun, even, the water catching me and boosting me back to the surface. It was nothing like when I fell off my skateboard, my arm out at an angle, breaking in two places and taking months to heal. The water would take care of me.
Later in the season, jellyfish flowered beneath me, visible below the surface on a mercifully clear day. I worked to avoid them with the paddle, knowing they couldn’t be hurt but wanting to avoid hitting them all the same—it just felt impolite, if nothing else. I sat on my board, straddling it, hypnotized by their orange and black pulses, their wet tiger movements. Later, I saw what looked like a rash on my leg, a stinging raspberry. They had offered me none of the grace I had reached out to them with, and I laughed. The sting, the thing I had been afraid of when our seas started filling with jellyfish, was barely a graze. It was proof that I had been there at all, in the water, forgetting about the day onshore. I missed it when it healed.
My last day of paddleboarding for the season was in October, the crisp water turning my feet blue regardless of the wetsuit’s thickness. I knew it was over, my hair hanging wet in the car, that I didn’t have the bravery of the winter paddleboarders to stick to something I had loved so much for the few good days we’d had over a particularly pathetic English summer. I watched them from the shore, at once jealous and in awe, but I knew I wouldn’t be hunched over a pump again until at least April. I found other things to fill the void–bouldering, skateboarding, pole classes–but none of them offered the distinct freedom of being alone in the water.
A friend of mine is known for a few things: being a big reader, spending some time screaming in a band and dedicating himself to music PR. He also, by cover of night because of the time difference from London, is invested in American basketball. When I told him I was working on this essay, he told me that Karl Ove Knausgård is obsessed with football, enough to have written a book, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, on it. George Plimpton stepped into the ring against a professional boxer for Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring. Many writers have approached movement with the same meticulous, obsessive diligence that they do words.
Why always an entire book? When someone predisposed to fixation turns to sport or movement, they rarely write just one essay about it. They rarely dabble. They write entire collections on their chosen topic. “Writing honestly about running and writing honestly about myself are nearly the same thing,” says Haruki Murakami in the introduction to his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I took this book on vacation and refused to read it on the plane because I knew it would make me feel restless. Murakami states that “a gentleman shouldn’t go on and on about what he does to stay fit,” but no matter—he is not a gentleman. His belief is that if you keep at any action long enough, it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
Murakami has to write about running in an effort to understand what it means to him; running is his way of coping with the world, and writing is his only tool to process. He compares the pace of running to the pace of writing, the two acts being marathons in their own way. Tricking your brain into doing more of the same tomorrow is essential when pulling together tens of thousands of words, but it’s also the only way to persist at something as boring as running several miles or swimming lengths. The act puts you into your head, and you have to find a way to live there. For Murakami, who in a good month runs 156 miles, running is a way of competing with himself, saying that long-distance running is the perfect fit for a “mindset like mine.” This is the same as writing: “What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standard you’ve set for yourself,” not how it measures up to other writers.
Writing and running are ecosystems that feed each other, but the running in particular for Murakami is a way of processing thoughts and feelings. He understands isolation and solitude as essential to his career, but sometimes, “this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.” That is why Murakami has to keep his body in motion, pushing himself to the limit “in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective.”
In particular, when someone criticizes or misunderstands Murakami, he goes running “for a little longer than usual,” believing that by doing so he can “physically exhaust that portion of [my] discontent.” He finds that in doing so he reaches his limit, realizes how weak he is, and becomes stronger. The anger and frustration that he feels, particularly in solitude, is metabolized by not only running but running far. The distance, the time spent on his feet, is the point. It is a means in itself. Usually a writer of fiction, in Running Murakami is flagrantly self-critical, claiming to not be the “brightest person,” truly believing nobody could like his personality. “Is it ever possible for a professional writer to be liked by people?” He asks, and while I hope the answer is “yes,” I understand his perspective.
I see my reflection in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, because I am a deeply neurotic person. My head spills over with constant overlapping thoughts, fears, fragments of songs, fixations, repeated images. I can’t shake them, though I have tried, with two decades of journaling and brief attempts at therapy. It is just how I will likely always be, the autism that makes me who I am also making it difficult to find five minutes of quiet inside my own head. The only thing I have found that makes it possible to find moments of respite, moments where the thoughts are easier to organize, is movement.
It’s a cruel irony, in its way, considering that I find the movement so difficult in itself, considering the scars and scrapes and bumps that I seem to get every time I try to lug my body around the world. The scars themselves are proof that I am capable, that I can be in the world, that my body is something to be moved however ungracefully. When I do something, I do it often and for a long time. It’s not commitment—it’s compulsion. I get in the pool meaning to swim 30 lengths, just something relaxing to start my day, and I swim 100. I took a class thinking it’d be “fun to try it,” and days later I had a 10-foot paddleboard and all the kit arriving at my door.
The reason Murakami does not believe himself to be an intellectual is because he needs to touch something to have a clear sense of it. This is the same reason he runs: “Only when I’m given an actual physical burden and my muscles start to groan (and sometimes scream) does my comprehension meter shoot upward and I’m finally able to grasp something,” he says. That is true of most people, but it is only in these sports books by professional writers that I find this thread of self-deprecation. Professional athletes, it seems, are rarely so self-flagellating. But while Murakami claims to have never been into team sports, to be such a solitary, unlikeable person who doesn’t need others, he closes close the book with a dedication to the runners he’s passed on the road: “Without all of you, I never would have kept on running.”
To the untrained eye, all tennis seems impressive. However, one junior tennis star turned writer had a prodigious understanding of the sport, and could tell when someone stood out. In David Foster Wallace’s celebrated 2006 New York Times essay on Roger Federer, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” it becomes clear that there is an eye through which to view tennis that mere mortals do not have access to. He starts by describing a moment of a match in great detail, which is evidence for why sports are shown on TV and not in books.
The way he views Federer’s body itself, the way it moves, is more interesting. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty,” says Foster Wallace, calling this human beauty “kinetic beauty.” “Kinetic beauty,” says Foster Wallace, is not about sex or cultural norms but “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” This is, in a line, what is essential to me about movement. As someone whose brain and body are not connected, having a mortal form at all is an odd kind of spiritual dysmorphia. I don’t watch many sports, but I do watch the Olympics. Watching gymnasts whose only tool is their sculpted body hurtle and vault and avoid what seems like certain death, I am experiencing a kind of kinetic euphoria. It is unthinkable to me that a person could be so in possession of their body, and I want to feel that. I keep working on it, thinking it is something that can be earned. I once coveted people’s bodies, jealous of how they looked. Now I envy what they can do.
David Foster Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, which means he was not good enough to pursue it into adulthood, but more than good enough to continue writing about it for the rest of his life. He is consumed by tennis, the sport following him around not because he finds it fun but because something in it has latched its tentacles into a brain already predisposed to obsession and addictive behavior.
Tennis is compulsive, fast-paced, all-or-nothing. Despite at the age of 14 ranking 17th in the United States Tennis Association’s Western Section, which seems good enough to me, Foster Wallace insists in his essay “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” from his 1997 collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again that he was “a pretty untalented tennis player.” He states that, “I could hit a tennis ball no harder or truer than most girls in my age bracket,” blaming in part his body’s slightness for his lack of athletic ability. Instead, he pins his success on both the Midwest and on his proclivity for math: “I knew my limitations and the limitations of what I stood inside, and adjusted thusly.”
Foster Wallace explains the math that makes sense to him in terms that make even less sense to me than sports, the movement of my body I can understand intuitively, I can curve and bend to understand, knowing that if my body wants to go right I can force it left. But math is outside of my realm of understanding, a mystery to me that is never worth solving. It is interesting to me that he insists on breaking what is clearly a preternatural talent down into these intellectual terms: aren’t all sports stars, in their way, experts at manipulating the laws of math and physics to bend to their will? Does that really negate their skill, their speed, the commitment that nobody sane would bring to it?
It is not athleticism, then, but “an almost Zen-like acceptance of things as they actually were” that made David Foster Wallace win so often in the “sickening damp,” wind, and uneven courts of the Midwest. He seems to believe he never would have gotten good at tennis had he grown up somewhere else, and maybe that’s true. He builds a kind of rivalry with a friend, claiming that while he was a “physical Savant,” Gli Antitoti was “uncomplicated from the get-go,” “bigger, quicker, and basically better than I by about age thirteen.” Foster Wallace was a late bloomer, and as his teammates and rivals bloomed and grew into their bodies, he remained that bird boy. As a bird boy competing against young men, he started to lose, that ability to control the wind no longer enough.
David Foster Wallace’s fixation on Federer’s beauty is refreshing, because as he states, men might consume sports but they do not talk about aesthetics: “In men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their ‘love’ of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war.” As a bisexual woman, this is absurd to me, but I digress. An athlete’s body is a machine, one that is hard to believe is as fallible as our own faulty machines. When they fail, they tend to do so spectacularly. Foster Wallace concludes that Federer is “one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws,” which for a time was true. Federer is now, of course, retired after a series of knee injuries, but not before becoming the oldest quarterfinalist at Wimbledon.
Bodies fail. Even the best ones do, so what hope do I have? It has taken me time to come to terms with it, but I know that I am disabled. Many parts of my body do not work properly or together: my soft tissues, my heart, my vascular and nervous systems. This means that I can’t work a normal job, which suits me because I don’t want one. Having a body that doesn’t work properly is a full-time job in itself. Everything in my life is oriented around her, around hospitals and cardiologists and tablets and moving just enough but not too much. No matter what you want to work on, what you are interested in, when you are sick, your body becomes the project.
That means that when my body can move, when it works well, I feel a strange pride and fascination that stops just short of worship, no matter how it looks. When I got married, I chose a dress with an open back. Friends remarked on how muscular my back looked, and it came as a surprise to me. While I had been working on getting stronger, my body had been knitting together fresh muscles just out of view.
I once described my body as a haunted house, but maybe it’s a temperamental classic car, one you have to tend to and love and fuss over, never letting it be too hot or too cold. Until I was 21, I had a classic Mini, with a hole in the floor and a moody carburettor. Taking care of myself feels much the same, but I can’t sell my body when it all gets too much.
My Pilates teacher remarked recently that I “know” the reformer better than anyone else, and I feel as if I do. Putting my body inside a restrained space makes it feel less like an uncontrollable force. The pool has lines. The reformer has edges. My paddleboard marks a clear delineation between the sea and my body. I’m a pretty decent driver. Being put physically into boxes makes my body make sense to me, gives me something to head towards, and in that way I suppose movement is math to me too. But because I hate math, it feels more like art, more like making shapes with my body that wouldn’t be possible without a paddle in my hand. I “commit” to movement not because I am athletic but because I am compulsive, because if I didn’t move my body in that way so many times a day I might go insane from the antsy feeling that fills my chest. But maybe it is only writers who get so in their head about how and why their body moves, who can’t just enjoy that it can.
What makes us the person that we are, that other people perceive us to be? Seeing photos of myself grinning in a wetsuit next to a ten-foot paddleboard, I feel as though I’m looking at a stranger. Knowing I am capable of using it, of cutting through the sea and rarely falling under the water, I feel further from the person I thought I believed myself to be. That feeling is second only to pride. Are we not just the things we do, over and over again, no matter our intention or perception of ourselves? Maybe, against all odds, I will be remembered as a swimmer—if not a great diver.
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