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.
Taking this class has made me think about my body dysmorphia and how I define my “self.” Am I a person inside a body or is my body my personhood as well? It’s hard to think of them as separate when I’m now learning to think about how my body defines and is defined by my existence in the world. It’s made me realize how much I depend on other people’s bodies to understand my own as well. It’s this weird cycle where how I perceive myself is based on how other people perceive me in comparison to themselves, which is based on how I perceive myself. That probably doesn’t make sense. It’s like: I move through the world based on how I think other people perceive me. But how they perceive me is based on how I move through the world which is based on how I think they perceive me. So it all comes back to this weird conflict in my mind about what’s real and what’s not and it sends me into a dysmorphia/depersonalization spiral… But to sum this all up, I don’t have any answers but I have a lot more thinking to do about what it means to take a phenomenological look at my existence when I’m still struggling to get a grip on what my body actually is.
Unruly Bodies 
I could empathize with this so much. I also don’t feel like I actually know what my body looks like. I didn’t have a good grasp on it before quarantine, but now it’s gotten even worse, with the freedom in clothing and being able to choose when/how I am seen. When I first heard about phenomenology last semester, I felt it was liberating because… it wasn’t that my mind had failed in taking control of my body, it was that my mind and body weren’t being a good team, weren’t being a good whole. Was I demanding from my body or was I listening to it? Was it my possession or was it me? I don’t have any real answers either but I think it’s important to consider and treat our bodies with intelligence and respect as much as we do our minds.
Really good questions!
I really love this post. The first time I read this, I thought, “WOW, this is actually how I feel too.” I never would have been able to put how I feel into words but this is it. I’ve experienced the pandemic similarly with my dysmorphia. Down to the rotation of my attire and having different perceptions of my body I would switch between. Having dysmorphia before the pandemic was bad, but now it’s definitely gotten worse. For me, I’ve been trying to go back into a self-love perception of myself. Between the weight gain, new stretch marks, clothes not fitting, it’s been depressing and hard to grapple with.
But I try to stay centered–to live, feel, and think in the moment: “This is my body, and I love me.” And, “I am my own body, and no one else defines me.” Getting used to my body in this way, and loving it this way, without the comments from others, and having something to compare myself to has been a love/hate thing. I miss the affirmation from others, but I also don’t. I miss the distraction of daily life that would separate my mind from my body–I wouldn’t think about my body as much as I do now. I definitely don’t have all the right answers–but moving to really analyze on how I perceive my body and what it looks like, and gradually moving to a more positive internal rhetoric has helped me.
Thank you so much for sharing this!