It’s the time of year when I get excited about planning my upcoming year; reflecting on what worked last year and modifying, choosing news stories and texts in some cases, finding new ways to teach the material, revamping what I do and still like.  It’s not stressful because I have time, and since I love organizing–concept organizing, that is, and not, say, closet organizing–it’s fun.

This summer is no different, but I have another item on my agenda.  One that isn’t about teaching, or education, or even my profession at all (although it impacts that, as well as everything else).  It’s about re-integrating my mind and body.

No, I’m not on some new-agey kick (not that I have anything against that, it’s just not me).  I’m not trying to find myself, and it’s not even a midlife crisis (although, come to think of it…).  It’s simply that over the last four years of medical comedy in my life, diagnoses and treatments and surgeries and prescriptions, I’ve lost track of my body.

More than that, I’m realizing that I not only have separated my body from “me” in such a way that it’s a foreign object, but that I absolutely hate this foreign object.  It causes me pain, and frustration, and it won’t do what I tell it to, and it keeps failing, and it interferes with everything I want to do.

I’ve been finding myself, more and more, watching commercials or programs or people in real life doing things that I used to do–simple things–and more and more I find I resent them, and hate my body, because I can’t do that.  Running, walking, canoeing, bending, reading, doing handicrafts.

I’m finding myself using language that highlights this separation, that labels my body a traitor, and I use metaphor that is violent (“I want a chainsaw to cut off these arms right now”).

I’m resentful–angry–over my eyes failing me when I’m an English teacher.  My reading has decreased an immense amount over the last three years or so, and it’s because I literally cannot see well enough to read at times–and it’s becoming more and more common. So many doctors, so many different “solutions”, and none of them have worked.  Meanwhile, my eyes get worse (and I had better than 20-20 vision for all of my adult life until recently).

I’m saddened and betrayed by the miscarriages.

I’m loathing of the autoimmune diseases that are killing parts of my own body, but it’s my own body that’s doing it.  I hate the pain, and I really, truly, hate the fatigue that keeps me from living the way I used to, from working as hard and as much as I used to.

I don’t like looking at myself–these conditions have done their damage on my appearance (weight, skin, etc.)–and all this resentment has built up so that, as Esperanza says regarding her environment vis-a-vis her *potential* at the beginning of The House on Mango Street, I feel like I’m a red balloon tied to an anchor.

And the key point there is that the “I” has nothing whatsoever to do with the body.  Separate entities, working against each other.

So, from discussions with my husband and a good friend–one who’s editing a book by a woman with a very similar journey–I’m realizing that this summer, along with setting up my Moodle courses, and finding a new novel for LA 8, and planning my new classroom, I have to re-integrate myself into a whole.  A flawed whole, granted, a whole with many parts missing and many parts not working properly, but a whole individual.

I need to learn to love this body again, and then perhaps I can heal.  And it’s not going to be easy.

My first steps?

• I am trying to nourish it better.
• I am starting T’ai Chi; I want strength, and I want to trust my limbs.
• I am trying to visualize positivity.
• I am starting acupuncture for the pain and meditation and integration.

And, since I’ll be teaching on overload this upcoming year *plus* going to grad school, I’m thinking now what I can realistically say “yes” to and what I will have to give up; I’m only one person, and one person with limited physical resources.

Of course, at the same time this is happening, I’ve managed another incurable diagnosis (spinal arthritis) to add to the Hashimoto’s, the Fibromyalgia, the Asthma, the (continue long, boring list here).  Also, my incision from a minor surgery on my back a couple of weeks ago has become, as happens often with me (weird immune system I have), infected.

But I’m trying very hard to not resent; accept, find the lessons, and adapt.  The resentment and hatred I’ve been carrying is contributing to the fatigue, I can only imagine, so it’s a mighty fine place to start.