This post was originally published in Volume 21 of my monthly newsletter, Imaginalia.  If you’d like to find out more about Imaginalia and sign up to receive it in your inbox each month, head over here.

I think it’s official:  I’m entering that phase of life where one can no longer ignore the (sometimes harsh) reality that bodies don’t last forever.

A few years ago, in my nurse practitioner’s office, I nervously produced a sticky note of health concerns I was experiencing, hoping that she would have enough time to address all of them in one appointment.  I made a joke about it and she said, “oh honey, once you reach your forties, you’ll have some years where we see each other every few weeks.”  Glancing at my list of mostly-quirky, mostly-just-annoying bodily quandaries, I chose to hear what she didn’t say:  that there will also be some years where I don’t have any reason to visit her at all.

After having lost that primary care practitioner and then going through the very long process – as all the Canadians reading this will know well – of finding a new one, I found myself in a similar sticky-note-at-the-doctor’s-office situation last week.  A couple years of falling through the cracks of the Canadian health care system – as well as a couple of years of intensive caregiving where my own self-care fell short of my attention – meant that I needed to catch up on things.  A pap, a mammogram, a skin tag removal, a vaccine, you know.

I had decided to get an x-ray of my spine.  I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease in my 20s, but, being in my 20s, I shrugged it off, mostly forgot about the diagnosis, and carried on being young and invincible.  Now in my 40s, I experience a fairly significant amount of chronic pain on a daily basis, and some of it is in my back.  I thought it made sense to see how things were going in there.

The words that are still ringing in my ears this morning as I write this were “bone-on-bone.”

My new nurse practitioner is a Scottish ex-midwife.  I’ve worked with a good many midwives with her vibe:  she’s kind and all rainbow overalls and jokes about your cervix, and she’s also blunt as hell.  As we peered at the x-ray of my spine, she pointed out a pars fracture of my lumbar vertebrae, a slight scoliotic curve, and the complete lack of any kind of disc at all between two of my lower vertebral bones***

“You see?  It’s basically bone-on-bone in there.”

The whole experience was both wildly validating (oh THIS is why it hurts so much!), anxiety-inducing (ohmygod I’m falling apart) and mystical (these defects and injuries are an exact mirror of the ones my teenage daughter is also currently grappling with).

In the week since this appointment, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my body.  Interestingly, I’ve also recently had quite a few people reach out after having discovered my first book, Project Body Love:  My quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead.  

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that I have a funny relationship with that book.  You can read more about that here, but, in short, I had a bit of a Glennon Doyle situation happen with it (you know, where she wrote a book about staying in her marriage and then got divorced right after it was published?).  Right after I published Project Body Love, I had a major health crisis that lasted the better part of a couple of years and caused me to question a lot of what I wrote.

Well, maybe not question it, per se, but to see more complexity than I could see when I wrote it.  I wrote it from a place of being a relatively healthy (fat) person, and so when I subsequently struggled with my health, I had to figure out how to love my body – or at least be in relationship with it – even when it wasn’t as able, or wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.

Sometimes I feel like I could write a whole new book on what happened after Project Body Love was published – about how I came to peace with the food and movement and care that my body needed outside of the framework of dieting and over-exercise.  When I published PBL, I was still very much in a “fuck that” part of my journey, misconstruing the supports my body probably actually needed with diet culture, misogyny, and patriarchy.  My rebellion got in the way of my healing.  I was too close to my days of dieting and over-exercise to see how it would be possible to offer my body what it needed to thrive without falling into a rabbithole of disorder and obsession.

So, anyways:  people have been reaching out to me, mostly having read Mothershift and then realizing that I have another book tucked in the archives and picking it up too.  In the last few years I’ve mostly felt complete with Project Body Love, but clearly, Project Body Love is not complete with me.

The result of all this has been a perfect storm of grief.

You see, my back injuries and degenerative disc syndrome are a direct result of the things I did in my 20s to try to change my body.  They were also things I did to prove myself to myself and to the world; to be cool; to be attractive; to make people pause and notice me.  There’s a whole soup of formative childhood experiences, the effects of living in patriarchy and probably, you know, being a Capricorn that made me a do what I did.***  I’ve paced the labyrinth of that healing work enough now; more reflection and rumination won’t serve me.

But I do wish that I hadn’t treated my body that way.

For the last week, my 43-year-old self has been running back to my 23-year-old self, wrapping her in my arms and saying:  you don’t have to do this.  This is harming you.  You can’t see it now, but please, please trust me.  You’ll wish you’d been gentler on yourself.  You’ll wish you could see that you don’t need to work so hard.  You’ll wish you could see all the misconceptions and misperceptions that have you feeling like your body is not good enough, that you are not good enough.  This is your only body, and if you want to live in it – and enjoy living in it – you. need. to. stop.

Despite my grief – or maybe because of it – I am experiencing a strange also-reality:  here I am.  Maybe I regret the things my 20-something self did that are now impacting my 40-something body so dramatically, but, here I am.  The thing I’m learning in my own journey and in those I support clients with is that life sometimes just fucking deals you a hand, and it’s not your job to push it away but to figure out how it informs your life.  To figure out what’s still possible.

But not without tending to the grief of everything you wish were different.

For me, the ability to grieve makes everything that’s still possible, possible.  It means that I can look squarely at the circumstances of my life and say:  here I am.  There are things that I wish were different and there are things that I can still do to support myself, but also, it’s okay to feel sad about how this has unfolded.

The grief of the way I treated my body is probably a grief I’ll always live with:  I’ll keep aging and my body will keep doing what bodies do and I will always be reminded of my desperate attempts to be thinner, cooler, prouder.

The only thing to do is to stay current with it:  to allow my grief to surface and to have a good cry or go for a walk about it or write about it or tell the chickadees about it.

I often find myself working with clients who are grieving the loss of an old self – or on the cusp of a big decision that they’re worried they might regret.  Grief and anticipatory grief like this can feel so daunting when we don’t know what to do with it; when we haven’t been taught the skills to work with it by a culture that deifies having no regrets and moving on.

But the secret of grief – and knowing how to grieve – is that it’s the surest pathway to a braver, richer life.  Grief literacy means we have a map and a method for confrontingthe hardest shit life can throw at us.  Sidling up next to the possibility – or maybe even inevitability – of loss means that we’re more available for love.  For the fullness of what life has to offer.

I sometimes ask Mary Oliver for advice, and grappling with the changes in my aging body felt like as good a time as any to turn to an elder for support.  And so I opened one of her books to a random poem, and this is what she told me:

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

I wonder about the vivacity of what was – that bold 20-something hungry to prove herself to the world – and how the way she lived her life is married to what is and what will be.  I think about the continuance of the seasons and what rich compost is made available as we descend into the second half of our lives.  May the grief I feel now be compost that nourishes a healthier relationship with my body as it ages.  May my experiences and what I’ve learned from them feed the seeds of my children’s relationships with their own physicality.  May my grief and how it informs what happens next cultivate healing backwards and forwards in time.

May it be so.

What about you?  Have you gone through a life transition or rite of passage that has changed your body?  How have you grappled with that?  What happens next?

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