The Blessing of an Honest Body
October Love Letter, Part Two
So here’s a fun story.
The day I sent out my last letter, I had a meeting with my literary agent scheduled for that afternoon — to check in about the book and see where I was in the process of ideating a rough table of contents and some sample pages. I set the intention back in the summer to have something tangible by October — it was the reason why I went to Gethsemani last month. But up until two days before the meeting, I still didn’t have anything cohesive enough to present as a plan, let alone actual pages.
You see, I treated this project the same way I treat all of my projects and implemented my Highly Scientific and Supremely Optimized Creative Strategy™: I titled a google doc “Book” and any time I had a thought about “Book” I wrote that thought into the doc.
That’s it. That’s literally all I did. For two months. I glanced over it from start to finish maybe twice, but I never actually read it. And I certainly never sat down to try and make any sense of it or shape it into something more concrete.
And while this isn’t unusual creative behavior for me, I can tell you that this was the first time in my life that I didn’t have a shame story labeling that behavior as irresponsible. Which means I wasn’t repeatedly telling myself I should be writing or creating any differently than I was.
It’s been way easier to let go of those stories now that I’ve started realizing what’s really going on here is that I’m waiting on God. Apparently.
On feeling myself inside of that flow.
On knowing that I’m being written through.
On the “transmission”, as Susan Sontag called it.
On my beloved Bradbury’s invitation to play in the fields of the Lord.
Without the shame, I felt no urgency or pressure. I never worried about it, never felt my body get into an activated state over it. I didn’t feel exceptionally at peace or anything, I just felt… fine. Normal. The way I feel when I truly believe that everything will be okay. And from that place, I just kept writing down every single “Book” thought into that “Book” document.
And, no joke, the evening before my meeting, it all just… came together. I was doing one of my final editing passes through my last letter and suddenly everything about the book clicked in an instant. I don’t really know how to explain what happened, but I can tell you how it felt. It was electric. Alive. Consuming. Clear. I suddenly somehow innately knew how to explain every detail of this book to myself. I opened “Book”, started typing, and when I looked up an hour later my proposal notes were complete. It was WILD. Susan was right… it felt like receiving a transmission.
I’ll share more over time (obvs), but I’ll tell you now that the overarching theme has everything to do with this sort of unintentional thesis statement I wrote into the last letter: “Our bodies are here to be our teachers, our guides, our partners in awakening, always showing us the path. Our doorways into abiding, always, in the presence of God. That’s actually what they exist for. And I’ve finally decided that I need to start figuring out how to tell you why I know that’s true.”
It’s that, right there. That’s the story, that’s the book. Because of course it is. Because I want to tell you all about this way of being in a body and I want to tell you the entire truth about how I found it. Which will take a while because it’s a long story and one that feels very sacred to me. Luckily, since I now know I’m going to be writing an entire book about this exact topic, I can relax into the relief of no longer feeling like I have to distill the story down into a single essay. Or even two. I can let everything take more time. You know… slow down. The continually emerging theme of my life these days.
Because I want to allow this story to unfurl as slowly as it deserves. I want to savor the unfolding and rearranging of it as it becomes a Final Form — and, in doing so, take my time giving you every single layered and textured and vibrant detail in these letters. This is my playground, after all.
So in that spirit, I’ll pick back up where I left off. I believe I had just been telling you about drugs and sobriety and how I’m most hesitant to talk about all of the sober stuff.
Maybe that sounds confusing or weird, but I’m totally serious about this. Because the sober stuff necessitates talking about the conscious choices we make — how we intentionally decide to live and move and exist in our bodies. Often over-simply defined as “personal responsibility”. And that topic is sensitive to discuss on the internet — precisely because the conversation is incredibly complex and deserving of careful nuance, and always will be. So I’ve been writing about this privately for over a year, taking my time and staying in quiet process.
How I started writing about all of this was that at the end of last summer, I was asked a really good question by my friend Jess. Jess is part of a small but mighty and deeply beloved online community that I host — where we’ve been talking together about being in loving relationship with our bodies for three and a half years. It’s seriously so sweet and special. It’s my favorite place on the entire internet and it has absolutely anchored me these past few years. (You’re welcome anytime!)
Anyway, Jess lives in Nashville so we met up for coffee and she asked me this really incredible question. It was at the end of our date and I live right next door to the cafe so after responding and talking about it with her for a while, I walked home and (as you now know is my singular creative process) opened a new doc, wrote down everything I possibly could about the conversation, and have continued adding every thought about that question to the document ever since. For fourteen months.
So, you know, I’ve got a lot of things to say.
And I’m finally ready to start figuring out how to say them.
Her question?
How do you navigate your life from the ethic of loving relationship with your body when you have a complicated body? A body that continually disrupts your life by being exactly who they are — a chronically sick body, a disabled body, a “non-normative” body. An inconvenient body, if you will. A body that never seems to cooperate, only ever seems to create conflict. How can you even begin to believe that your body loves you when you have a body like that?
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”. And the truest thing I can tell you is that what happened in my life after Jess asked me that question is exactly is how I know he was right. Because almost immediately after I started obsessively writing about that question, I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself living it.