Writer Laura Hoffman brings us this week's Sunday Long Read as her essay explores the numerous looks inside of her body by medical professionals as she has dealt with a lifetime of medical issues, and how the X-ray may be the one true unflinching view of ourselves in a way.
In front of the mirror, I touch my forearm and my ribs that jut out like bulbous rock formations. My left arm, shoulder, and chest are smaller than my right. The bones and muscles are misshapen or missing altogether, and an implant fills in for my left breast that never grew. I have no feeling in the skin where I am touching, so there’s the peculiar sensation that I am touching someone else’s body and not my own.
I’m 14, 23, 31. Still, getting out of the shower, I hustle into a robe or T-shirt, turning away from the mirror. It is a trick I developed as a girl: if I disregard my body’s differences, maybe others will too. When I do dare to look, I’m struck by my body’s oddity as if discovering it anew each time: the centipede-like scar on my forearm, the thin skin rippling over my implant like the silken surface of water, the bones in my shoulder that rub together like a sack full of stones. The mirror provides one way to glimpse how others see me, to learn how to see myself. When I look for too long, panic wells in my chest.
I don’t ever talk about my body, not even to my sister or close friends. I can’t. I would lose my balance, my structural integrity. Instead, for years now, I have been trying to write about it. As Richard Rodriquez wrote: “There are things that are so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers” (200). Sitting at my desk, I cross my arms to grasp opposite elbows. I hunch over the keyboard. I long to excise the words. To get them to lie down legibly on the page. To stand in for me when I cannot.
Putting words to the experiences my body holds, the back braces and wrist splints, the stitches and scars, the filling of the absence in my chest—the props that grant me passage to the world—feels impossible. Sometimes it feels like every other second I have to call my attention back to the page. I grow impatient with myself. Can’t you just say it? Instead I look down at my hands. In the yoga I practice and teach, we say the body speaks by way of sensation. My hands tense up. My breath is shallow inside my ribs. My jaw clenches. The tiny muscles around my eyes feel strained. Instead of pushing it away, I am learning to experience my avoidance, to see what it has to teach me. What is this resistance protecting me from feeling? When did I learn that my body is something I have to hide, even from myself? I know I won’t be able to see myself clearly if I keep refusing to look.
When I feel stuck, I make lists in my notebook, arranging the parts of my body in different orders as if there is a code to decipher, a language running underneath the language I am using. Arm, spine, breast, skin, voice. I scar the pages so deeply the swerves of my pen can be felt through the underside of the paper. It feels as if I’m carving these words from bone.
Set aside some time for this one, it's a gorgeous piece.
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