Finishing the Spring 2020 semester was honestly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do because of the stress™ of quarantine. So, when I found out I was getting less than a 0% chance to live in a campus apartment with my best friends, I knew I needed to move out of my childhood home. It took me a week to convince my parents I wasn’t joking about moving out. It took me another week to explain how staying at home would break me down to the shell of a human. Eventually I made my point. 

My parents’ term (yes, term) of agreement for moving out: Get a job. And a job I got!

A few days into job hunting, I was interviewed and hired at Sonic Drive-In. A week into the job, I was getting used to working with repetitive motion, heavy lifting, and spending uncomfortable lengths of time on weak ankles. We don’t have restaurant mats for support, because at Sonic, we die like men. 

Bodies scare me.  We need them to exist, but they require so much work to maintain and upkeep.  Between the mental, emotional, and physical sides of things taking care of a body in an ideal world is a full-time job.  When you add in trauma, mental illness, physical illness, difficult living situations, stress from jobs or relationships, and all of the other things that make it more difficult to maintain a body, the amount of effort and time needed can quickly become overwhelming.

As someone who has grappled with long term health complications since my youth, being confronted with the coronavirus pandemic has been…interesting, to say the least. A lot of things are familiar, albeit still scary: not knowing if and when I’m going to get devastatingly sick and trying to find ways to cope with this is a big one. But another major thing that has stuck with me, and yet, goes comparatively unaddressed is the unshakable feeling of isolation and outright invalidation that comes with living with invisible illnesses during these times. 

In just a few weeks, this course has taught me about how the body is a source of knowledge and a medium for knowing the world. However, it has also made me think about what it means to use my body to know when I don’t really know my body. One of my side effects of living through a pandemic has been a heightened sense of body dysmorphia and depersonalization. The combination of being isolated with my family, gaining weight, rotating between three pairs of biker shorts and two oversized tees, and spending hours just laying in the bed during the first few weeks of quarantine really warped my perception of what my body looks like and how I exist in reality. Sometimes it feels like I have no idea what I look like. Sometimes I think I know and then convince myself that that idea is inaccurate and I could really look like anything. Sometimes I look in the mirror and my mind just flips back and forth between different bodies that are all supposed to be me. I had no one around to compare myself to, no other human beings around to measure the accuracy of my perception. It felt like we heard about the pandemic one day, started quarantine the next, and then when I woke up the next morning I was in a completely different body that didn’t look or feel the same as it did before everything started. It happened so fast, my mind needed time to catch up. I looked at myself and knew that was me but at the same time there was a disconnect between who I “knew” to be “me” and who I was looking at. A separation between self and body. 

It was the first day of practice and my heart was beating out of my chest. Sophomore year was here and I was even more nervous this time around. I came into my fall season with a different kind of butterflies in my stomach.  Yes, I had some nerves about practices and my performance on the field but the root of my anxiety came from my appearance and fitness. “Was I thin enough?”, “Was I fast enough”, “Was I strong enough?”一these questions were constantly floating around in my head.