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How Hiking Healed A Broken Woman
And my relationship with my body.
The longest war you’re willing to endure is the one you wage with your body. Decades I’d been at this. Pillaging. Fighting since I was able to hold the weight of a weapon in my hand. Only the war is here, in my house. Even closer still. The war I wage was within and against my own body. And like any war, I made a mess of it. The losses are incalculable. The armory ossifies. The weapon I once held up proudly as a child comes apart in my hand. Was it the knife I used to carve and whittle away flesh from bone? Or was it duct tape to keep my mouth shut, the refrigerator shut, and so on?
I have suitcases of issues. Come. Feel their weight. In the first case, mother. The second, weight. The third is love, but sometimes this eludes me because I’ve always considered love and loss flip-sides of the same coin.
I never asked for this body, this blood, handfuls of skin I can grab from my hips. I don’t understand it. This was one of the few things my mother got right. She never talked about a body in terms of size. Rather, who you were mattered. What you did mattered. The kind of woman you would become mattered. Size never factored into the equation, she couldn’t be bothered with it. She regarded weight as something one simply gained or lost. Fat, skinny, stout, stocky — to her these were…
