I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in high school, which was probably the closest I have come to death. It was also around this time that I became entrenched in body hatred. I was doubled over in pain, alone with my thoughts, expelling moisture and nutrients at an alarming rate. The thought of my own body and the world that gave rise to it being burned away, decomposed, scrubbed clean, or dissipating in a blinding, fiery light to be replaced by a new one had become particularly enticing narrative for me.
Growing up in a Christian family, I had been held at divine gunpoint as a youth to recite, “Lord, be my savior,” lest I be tortured forever, but now I had conscious, seemingly eternal torment in this life that I needed salvation from. My disease was something in the here and now. I wasn’t suicidal in the traditional sense, but I didn’t anticipate any dramatic, miraculous healing or cure, so I looked forward to dying and being reborn.
Not only did my body try to kill me, but it viciously took away my sense of control, dictating what goes in as well as when things come out of me. This attempted murderer and kidnapper, who violated and embarrassed me in the most intimate ways, dictated where I could go and how I could get there. I was a prisoner of a body that continually violated my trust and self-worth. I wanted to be free, and if not that, then I wanted to strike back against what was holding me in violent captivity. This body hatred isn’t a new concept for Black people, but this application was new to me.
Blackness was as incidental, arbitrary, and extraneous as my eye color or hair color within the Fundamentalist Christian cosmology I grew up with. Galations 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I understood historical racism and white supremacy primarily in terms of Europeans colonizers misapplying the implications of Yahweh ordering the violent invasion and genocide of Canaan, and a failure to properly apply Galations 3. But Galations 3 also meant there wasn’t really room for my Blackness to matter except as world-building or trivia.
My embrace of Blackness shifted radically during my long de-conversion from Christianity, but the end of my body hatred didn’t immediately follow. The idea that fascinated me the most during this time was the possibility that Black Americans could accomplish all that we had under such arduous conditions without the aid or planning of an omnipotent deity. I was raised to attribute any of our collective successes and our continued survival to Yahweh. But with His intervention in our lives out of my worldview, all I had left was to be impressed and in awe of us, or at least those of us who could accomplish impossible feats, which I couldn’t.
I was now grateful and honored to be among Black people, but at the same time the cultural disconnections between myself and the core of Black America became ironically more pronounced. So many of my formative years were spent in a white-run Christian school, I never learned AAVE, my disdain for Abrahamic monotheism and openness to African polytheism now alienated me from the vast majority Black people who would otherwise embrace my frankly classist Black acculturation in a private Baptist Christian school, and my solidarity with queer and gender nonconforming Black people put me at odds with many, many enthusiasts of traditional African religion/philosophy.
The realities of my Crohn’s disease only compounded this disconnect. The other ways I felt alienated were more external and superficial, but Irritable Bowel Disease seemed to act as a slave ship dragging me even further away from my community. My sluggish reaction time and movement as a result of brain fog and fatigue (early symptoms of Crohn’s) made activities like dancing and athletics less tenable for me. My delicate intestinal condition often bars me from even remote appreciation of Black American cuisine, not without paying a hefty price in terms of diarrhea and fatigue that leave me physically frail as it comes through.
There is so much of “pro-Black” rhetoric that has, on some level, been infiltrated by the myth of Black superhumanization. We’re told in so many ways that we can endure and persevere through physical and emotional hardship to a greater degree than others, that we feel less pain, that we don’t tire as easily, that we can take on added responsibilities without consequence. Black people who cannot do this are a less than useless, parasitic aberration. A perversion of our proper natures.
I came to think of myself as heroic and noble for deciding never to have biological children for a time. I was the master breeding unproductive livestock out of existence. I had too many special needs to practically maintain or squeeze industrious labor out of. In the midst of this continued body hatred, I fantasizing about becoming a cyborg. I hated my body because I saw it as a presence invading my positive self-image. I fondly imagined dismemberment, being blown up, shot, eaten away, only to be rebuilt even better than before or pumped full of nanomachines. I wanted to be like Cyborg from Teen Titans, Robocop, Grey Fox or Raiden from the MGS franchise. I would have a body that behaved in a way I considered more reasonable and rational. Not only would I make sure my cursed genes died with me, but maybe I could kill the Crohn’s and save what was left of a person inside.
After some time and reflection, I’m on the fence about biological children, but my embrace of non-Western philosophy such as the works of Marimba Ani has eroded my faith in the hard Mind-Body dichotomy in framing reality. I learned that my body doesn’t have to be productive for me to have value. There is a lot of good that came about under these conditions, and good that has always existed concurrently with it that I had become distracted from seeing because of anti-Black narratives of superhumanization.
Loving my body isn’t easy in sentiment or in practice, but I’ve discovered so many liberating reasons to try. It’s taught me gratitude, when the want for what I have tries to eclipse my want for things that can’t be changed. It’s teaching me to be more compassionate to others dealing with mental illness and other disabilities over the course of unpacking my own internalized ableism. I’ve become comfortable describing myself as “slow”; I never imagined how liberating it can be to admit that without negative connotation. It’s helped me develop greater compassion for homeless people.
It’s revealed to me the holes in Capitalist/Industrialist/WASP Work Ethic value systems. It’s made boycotting the exploitative producers of soybeans and canola a significant deal easier because of the havoc they wreak on my insides. It’s made fasting easier, just taking advantage of relapses to do some necessary, spiritual mediative work. It’s teaching me patience. It’s teaching me how to bounce back from disappointment over and over and over again, in every sickly trip to the restroom and every flareup.
It’s teaching me to fear pain and embarrassment and accidents less. It’s teaching me that not all pain is redemptive or character building, and “deserving” often has nothing to do with it. We all deserve support in healing from the pain we haven’t consented to. It’s given others the occasion for kindness I might not have otherwise known was there even as my politics become more pessimistic. Ultimately, this journey has made me feel less zombified, shitty, wretched, like a corpse taking the scenic route in decomposing. It’s possible I could have learned all of this another way, but I can still value the necessary things I learned because of the process I went through.
I should count myself as lucky. Some folks would pay handsomely to feel as close to death as I do. Crohn’s became an old, cantankerous frenemy. My closeness to it reveals that, yes, the world is in a corrupted, fallen state, but not in the way I was taught. It’s corrupted because it’s a world people like me would want to escape from.
I do need to escape from the world my body was made to exist in, but my condition has given me the opportunity to see just how connected I am to so many others in need of Liberation from the same modern colonial value systems that would have me physically and spiritually dead. Most importantly, my condition is teaching me to hate all of the lessons that made me hate myself and to hate every attempt to re-instill those lessons. Through that, I know who my enemies are.
Now, I understand how I can participate in a vision of Blackness that facilitates the creation of a Liberated world to replace the burning, eternally tortured one holding all of us captive.
Escape is little more than retreat, but Liberation is the creation of something you don’t need to escape from.
Suggested Reading:
JaLoni Owens, “Any conversation about disability justice must wrestle with Black trauma“, RaceBaitr, 2019
Disability Solidarity: Completing The ‘Vision For Black Lives’“, HuffPo, 2016
Pascal Roberts, “Black Eugenics: How the Black Mis-leadership Class of the Early 20th Century Supported Sterilization of the Black Poor“, Black Agenda Report, 2015
