What My Back Tells Me
This was my response to a writing prompt that I came up with for one of my weekly writing workshops. The theme for the week was “Mind & Body” and listening to what our bodies are telling us. Thinking about the different parts of our bodies and what they’re communicating to our minds. Then write out what each part is telling us right now. What is your stomach telling you? What is your feet telling you? What is your back telling you?
Photography by Anika Fanlo
You have these tiny mountains dug into the bones of your back, each vertebrae its own novel of stories, neatly stacked upon each other, hiked up and down the entirety of your skin’s landscape. You carry these mountains like a back pocket of secret escapes but you don’t get to visit them much, not unless you finally look into the mirror and contort yourself, sometimes painfully. All that work to see your mountains. But most of the time, you forget how much they are a part of you—these sunken bends and contoured curves. It’s their weight that really overburdens you, so much so that you slouch too much, letting gravity do the heavy lifting for you. It’s always easier to let the world carry your weight. Remember how much you’d get in trouble for slouching? It didn’t look becoming of you but standing tall somehow felt heavier. Why is it that we’re built in a body that made it difficult to keep our head up high? Always working against gravity. You weren’t built for this, you’d tell yourself. Your spine is too weak, you’d assume. Besides, all the important parts of yourself are the ones you can see and hold. The ones in front of you.
But this back, this beautiful sinewy back, holds the spine of your open-booked body. The eyes of strength that watches out for you towards the things you turned away from. The one that gets the last look when we turn our backs towards the things we no longer love. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to scrub with our own hands. Why touch what holds the last memories of things that hurt us?
This back is your armored blanket of flesh and bones that wraps around you every time you curl up into a ball and try to disappear from the world. It folds over you like the clouds closing in when the storm is about to fall as you cover your heart into the dark of your body and tuck your head into the soft palms of your hand. You wail into the black hole of your sunken self so that it will absorb it all like a sponge of wrung out pain, and you won’t have to feel it again. Not anymore.
Things come back to us because gravity is doing its work. Remember when you said it was easier to let the world carry your weight? Well, she is. And she is returning some things to you through the halls of gravitational pull because you’re ready to see them again, and this time, from the front. That’s why it’s called “confrontation.” We have no choice to but to look at these things dead in the eye and tell them who we are now and who aren’t anymore. Our backs were shielding them away for us until we were ready to face them head on and here they are, back in our lives. I used to curse the universe for conspiring in this way—bringing pain back like I am forever stuck to this haunted bind. But I realize now that the universe is teaching me growth and healing and their unapparent, nonlinear effects. See, your body knew these promises before your mind did. Your body buried these down because it knew your mental capacity of understanding was not ready to comprehend the bigger picture just at this moment.
Do you ever think how our mind and body work in alignment, not in a matter of always being on the same page, but in the way a healthy partnership energizes both parties. The mind tends to your direct thoughts and feelings as you are constantly navigating and readjusting yourself to fit in the nooks and crannies of the world while your body patiently prepares and actively nourishes for what’s to come since it has always known this world it entered into. So it’s always churning and expanding and pumping energy, keeping busy and healthy while your mind coaxes the fluttering activities of your thoughts and feelings as you’re taking in the uncertain reality of everyday. It’s this secret love language between your mind and body so you don’t have to take on so much, consciously.
In between the peaks, the indents, the bumps, the smoothness of soft-skinned terrain, your back is a language of land all on its own. And these hushed whispers are reminding you that your head cannot stay balanced without the support of your back.
