I No Longer Experience My Body as Neutral Territory

Dear Delyara, Once your body has frightened you, once waiting rooms and tests and symptoms and “let’s just keep an eye on it” have entered your life with enough seriousness, the body stops being background and becomes subject. It becomes something you listen to too hard. Something you monitor. Something you negotiate with. Something you mistrust at the edges. And that changes a person. I miss not hearing every ache in stereo. I miss not attaching meaning too quickly. I miss living in a body that felt more like home than possibility. People think health fear ends when the appointment ends. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it lingers as atmosphere. Mine does.