I’ve spent the majority of my life avoiding vulnerability. Talking about endometriosis with someone that doesn’t have it often becomes a judgment of how sick I seem. I’ve heard, variations of but you don’t look sickor but you’re so activemore times than I can count.
Is a body yours when you step outside your house? I’ve spent most of my life feeling like my body isn’t mine. The first time a man told me to smile, I was 20, waiting for a Rutgers University bus to take me from Busch Campus to Livingston Campus. I still burn with anger remembering that I smiled back. I felt vulnerable to be told in public what to do with my body, I wanted it to end. Why would I want to live my life with vulnerability?
Frances, the main character in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, is diagnosed with endometriosis. She doesn’t tell anyone. Even before this, she spent her life concealing vulnerability in relationships. She decides not to tell her mother as they leave the doctor, thinking, “I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it.”
To summarize the interaction: her doctor tells her there is no cure. He explains that endometriosis spreads but isn’t cancerous, and treatment is geared towards preventing pain debilitating to the point of disability. Frances’s detached and ironic personality throughout the book laid out one way to cope with the frustrations of endometriosis. The suffering has no end, so there isn’t much to do other than get on with it. Vulnerability feels like weakness when you’re in unmanageable pain.
There can be a way to manage. I found aerial arts in 2014, at the recommendation of a good friend. It wasn’t until climbing the aerials silks that I felt like I had some claim over my body in adulthood. I’d already been struggling with painful periods, which later became weeks of fatigue which later became vomiting with nearly every period. My body couldn’t withstand the distance running I enjoyed, so I changed my interaction with gravity. Gravity has more potential.
There is something special about aerial arts. When you commit to repetition, your body learns the language. Your body can tell a story with a toe point or flex, with the emphasis of a hair flip or outstretched hand or the point in your back that you arch. This is all without thinking about sexuality—it’s about the potential of movement. The aerial school I attend has opportunities for student showcase, so whenever I can, I jump to perform creatively.
This showcase season, I was with a group of warrior women that we came to call the Jedi coven. We danced on strappy loops to the Star Wars theme song. I began the session with trepidation—my strappy loops background was limited. Class started in February and I’d only taken a few months of strappy loops classes. Was I really going to be ready and capable of keeping up in 3 months? even though I’d been in lyra for a few years, I felt completely inadequate in strength and flexibility compared to my classmates.
The fear stopped meaning anything in the safe and open environment we fostered. Even as I had a horrible reaction hormonal birth control, I was thinking about making it to class. At one point during a Saturday warm-up I said, I’ve had my period for 20 days. If I start crying on the strappy loops, it’s not personal.
We performed in a show with forty other classmates on May 18 and 19. Our last performance had a vibrating, joyful energy. The six of us ran offstage, laughing and smiling, emotionally open and alive—dare I say, vulnerable. One remarked that we should have had that attitude every class. Probably. I’m holding on to the feeling so I can take it with me each day.
Stay sweaty and glittery.
Books I was thinking about while writing this: Thick, Tressie MacMillan Cottom; Bestiary, Lily Hoang; Sex Object, Jessica Valenti.
#poetsthatsweat 