I am, therefore I am

On what the body can tell us.

When I was in my early twenties, I started reading about other women's relationships with their bodies. I found Cat Valente's A Brief History of My Human Suit. I got sucked into Roxane Gay's pop-up magazine, Unruly Bodies, especially Carmen Maria Machado's piece, which ends, "I do not hate my body, because such a thing would be pointless, shortsighted. You cannot hate an animal for what she is, especially one who bears your ungrateful mind through this terrible world," words which stuck with me for years. I stumbled across, somewhere, the phrase meat sack.

I wasn't fat – a term I use as descriptor, not as judgment, in as much as that is possible in today's world – which is what many of these writers were exploring, the problems of having a body other than that which the world wants from a person, but this phrasing, this way of thinking, stuck with me. To me too, my body was a problem.

My body, specifically the fact of inhabiting a female body, made me visible, policeable, grabbable, in ways I didn't want to be. My body, the fact of my having a female one, was the reason I wasn't allowed out after dark. My body had to show up to school every. single. day. and to wear the clothes that were specified and to suppress its own needs – to eat, or to cartwheel barefoot over the grass, to use the toilet (an appalling statistic: over 70% of girls in the UK aren't allowed to use the toilet during lessons. Really think about that for a second). It required shelter and warmth that were forbidden: breaktimes were strictly Outside. It was a site of public commentary and speculation, and of shame. It grew hair in places it wasn't supposed to. Once a month or so, it bled, a process that under no circumstances must be allowed to enter public consciousness.

It was useful, too: my body was the 'right' shape for the time and place I was living in; it got me jobs and sexual partners and access to alcohol and drugs in the ways that teenage girls often have access to alcohol and drugs. It was a tool, but mostly it was an inconvenience.

Realising this – having my relationship with my body problematised – made me start looking for ways to understand it.

I listened to a podcast on the mental health impact of body dissatisfaction which mentioned research that found a link between early breast development in girls and later depressive symptoms and thought of course. Of course having your body become a matter of public interest overnight, realising that you are valued for your body's shape and youth before you have had time to learn that you are much more than that, being turned into a sexualised being without your asking or consenting, of course that doesn't correlate with positive mental health outcomes.

I got into body positivity and body acceptance, the idea of valuing our bodies for what they can do, not what they look like. I joined the circus – incidentally, one of the most body-positive spaces I've ever been in – and started taking pleasure in what my body could do, but also getting frustrated when it didn't do it fast enough or demanded rest days, got injuries that required months of physio. (It's taken me years to move to the reflexive I injured myself from the passive I got injured, to grammatically accept the responsibility for this, and even now it doesn't come naturally).

None of this, really, shifted my fundamental approach towards my body: I was me, and it was it. It was a human suit I was obliged to wear, an animal that required more than I wanted to give it. I fed it and clothed it and walked it and paid exorbitant amounts for specialist physiotherapists, and resented the fact of all of this.

Then, last year, I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Koelk and Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. I learned a lot: that the psychological is physical, that the body expresses things which the conscious mind will not or cannot. That it's possible to trace the split self which I was experiencing back to Descartes (he of the infamous I think, therefore I am), back to capitalism's requirement for workers to show up at times that suited the factory, not the humans working in it, back to the Enlightenment thinkers' attempts to distance reason (strangely limited to wealthy white men) from the passions of the body, an unfortunate disease suffered by women, the poor, and anyone else that it was convenient to oppress.

At around the same time, I got sick. Not really sick, just sick enough to have to stop for a couple of weeks and notice that even before this my body had been telling me for a while that I wasn't OK. My hair had been falling out. I had a rash that started on my shoulders and gradually made its way to my thighs, that everybody agreed wouldn't kill me but that nobody know what to do with. Once, my period stopped for three days, halfway through.

I thought perhaps I should pay attention to these clues. I didn't know what to do with them yet, but I found a coach and a counsellor who specialised in body psychotherapy and I started doing Headspace's old year-long course (it's still there, if you poke around for it) and I realised - for the first time, truly, at age 35 - that feelings are called feelings because you can feel them, in the same way you can feel a sore knee or the sun on your skin, if you pay attention and know where to look.

I learned - slowly, and begrudgingly - that I did know what I wanted, I knew the things that needed to change and the direction they needed to go in, both in my life and in the world outside. I have always been able to think myself round in circles, to argue both sides of the debate, but my body knows, if I listen to it. In learning how to listen to it, I learned how to trust my instinct, to find what it is that I want and to acknowledge what it is that I don't want.

I don't think I'd have started People Equals Purpose if I hadn't read those two books, if I hadn't had the help and resources to start to mend my relationship with the majority of my self, if I hadn't come to accept that my meat suit had some things to tell me.