Body(Untitled) - an account
We are in the midst of a bizarre moment of history where hugging has become dangerous and some of the most powerful and influential countries are on the brink of civil war. It’s a time. A pandemic that has shown us some of the ugliest and some of the most beautiful sides of humanity.
Accessibility has noticeably diminished and across many rhetorics the words ‘but it only affects those with pre-existing conditions’ echoed in streets, supermarkets and across national news & media. As if, somehow because these bodies perceived already broken are therefore diminished in value and can be acceptable collateral loss in exchange for being able to drink a latte in a cafe or not having to wear a mask for five minutes whilst shopping…but as we are learning this is not quite the case, many are at risk of great harm but dis-proportionately disabled members of our community are dying.
In among this chaos, where within community I have been reflecting outwards, understanding the many privileges I do have that allow me to now safely shield, understanding that mutual aid is an imperative & beautiful infrastructure I believe we must all now adopt, but internally, internally I have spent the most part of 2020 separated from my own body in a more violent way than ever before.
Living with a chronic illness within an ableist society is something that I have never known how to navigate.
(Living with a chronic illness that now prevents me from safe human physical contact, entering sweaty dance studios or breaking bread with friends has been an unimaginable one. And yet..)
In an industry of movement that emphasises heavily on physical excellence (whatever the fuck that means) having a body, a nervous system, a condition that disrupts what this narrative of a dancers body might look like, feel like or be capable of is a fine line. An invisible condition, my auto-immunity means that there have been weeks, months where my body can not retain movement, it remembers little, muscles do not retain strength no matter how hard I ‘work’, joints and glands swell, brain fogs, skin agitates and two or three days of the week are ’duvet days’.
What does this mean for a dancing body? What does this mean for a working body?
I have hid it, slept for three days to be able to dance for two, only arising out of bed to work, brave face, real smiles but exhausted body, high function followed by almost no function and I am really good at my job, but it can be physically costly.
Other months by condition remisses, energy, memory, strength return, duvet days become less to none! Sleep actually feels restful and I am digesting. It’s so fucking inconsistent. (a word that rang through all of my report cards throughout my formal dance training, ‘Linzy shows high ability yet is inconsistent within her technicality and we feel she could give more’. I was really ill, but at the time thought I just wasn’t enough, I had no ‘more’ to give.)
I spent a lot of this catastrophe’s first act ingesting the anger I felt from others around me, my body was preventing them from doing what they wanted, my health was my problem, why should they have to accommodate for me, and so rather than seeing the pandemic as a collective issue, it seemed like many felt that it was a problem of the sick, the weak and more increasingly the poor to burden. Not theirs. Anger at restrictions were being fired at individuals, and not, at the gross miss-handling and negligence of a Tory government whose austerity policy has culminated in the vulnerability of millions of people.
It’s amazing how quickly this collective underlying and sometimes even unknown negative bias towards you can ingest itself into your fibre. I’ve never had to work so hard to love my body more. I watched peers return to dance studios over the summer for that brief interlude where ablism felt like the pandemic was over, and felt the sadness of many other dancers as they weighed up their own health conditions and risk of exposure, and without knowing the true risk, felt like taking a class just wasn’t worth your life. and its really fucking not.
In spite of seeing these very tangible social inequalities appearing, the infrastructures of societal ablism, failing Tory rule and public want for normality surpassing shared societal responsibility, somehow I still turned upon myself.
Anger. In the second lockdown of November 2020, I listened to friends, those who had partied, been on holiday and jumped on the ‘eat out to help out’ (a slogan forever logged in my mind as the best feminist manifesto the Tories never knew they wrote) complain about another lockdown, how shit it is. It hit hard, BUT they’re not really to blame either, people are trying to just.get.through.it. Not destroy their mental health completely and go on hope that the government must have done their research,… right..? Just the getting through it for some is just a fuck tone harder than others. Meanwhile the disabled and vulnerable communities have been patiently waiting the whole while, lockdown has been a constant, in knowing that the more everyone else mixes, embraces and travels, the longer we wait, shield and opt out.
In my lack of words, distress for the situation at hand, my anger at anti-maskers/mass gatherings and my own peers, so eager to touch with each other but happy to not touch me and respect ‘my’ boundaries, (as if it’s really a choice) internalised. How to shake it out? It’s a real journey, one that I feel now more than ever we HAVE to do with as much harm reduction as possible and moving together, in what ever form that feels good, connective and purposeful is a key part of this journey. Dances come in many forms, through play, through touch, through repetitive action, through sharing the collective belief in something, mutual aid, choreography of social distancing. All a dance and one we should do together.
