Letter to my body

Body letter

The task involved writing a short letter to our bodies. Well, not a community endeavor, because that would be a different audience, a collective purpose. No, this task was more specific, singular: MY BODY. Using MY VOICE. From MY HEAD. There was too much to say to jam into the parameters of X amount o words. I have a lot to say to my body. I have a lot of shaping to do, a lot of correcting, a lot of guiding and providing it insight. Most of the things I say are done out of positive intentions: It should be more proud, it should be less ashamed. Some of it was apologetic, requesting forgiveness. Across a month I attempted to produce some bit of communication, and yet a rebellion occurred. The voice emerging not mental in nature at all. It was my heart that spoke. My head wasn’t ruling over and wisely advising my body in the usual modus operand. No, the distant tone insisting the audience was my body. My body finally asserted that IT had something to declare to my mind, to the core of me.
Here is my body’s letter to my mind. Dear audience, do it justice and speak it aloud. This is not the space for shyness. Do not isolate it to the corners of your brain. It demands to be spoken, infused with the elixir of your lungs, your diaphragm, your breathy throat. Please, speak my heart.
Speak me
Speak me



You react to me as if I am unruly. You insist that I behave
You attempt to tame my appetites. You bind up my feet, cover up my lines and disguise my softness. You regulate my tempos, minimize my cycles, ignore my flow.
You attempt to mold me in some image for a crown you crave.
You minimize me in order to gain entry into a party room that does not have your name on the guestlist.
I scare you. I mesmerize you. I confuse you…you fail to notice how I swell, alter, shift. You’d rather forget me altogether.

You have got it all wrong.
I am not something you merely “have a relationship with”
I am not the foreign-tongued enemy that you bomb from distant lands, assuming your superiority. I am not the bestfriend to whom you whisper your secrets when the sun submerges.
I am not separate. Distinct. Something you possess, seize, rule.
I don’t belong to you.
I am not an image you have, a shape shifting mirage in the desert of your spiritual thirst.
I am not a part of you: the seeing part, the breathing part, the bleeding part, the fat or thin part.
I AM.
you.
I am all that you are:
An announcement of vigor, vulnerability.
The sacred, the secular

So… I will not beg for your mercy.
I will not crawl and request that you stop apologizing for me.
I will not defend my desires or barter for gratification.
There will be no passive-aggressive revolt against your discrimination.
There is no repentance required. No abdication to forgive.
Just the denouncement of illusionary exile.
And the proclamation of being.
I AM.
you.