Visual + Multimedia Work

As I understand it, you’re supposed to be able to feel your body. Stuff brushing past you; your clothes resting on your skin; the bus seat under your butt and thighs. I can’t feel things like this, even when I try.

I used to feel like I was the biggest failure in group therapy sessions when they’d do mindfulness exercises and ask us to think about the physical sensations we felt. I know it was all about grounding us and making us aware of the present, but it just freaked me out and made me panic.

I dunno if it’s a sexual assault thing or an autistic whose skin used to feel like it was on fire when I was forced to wear certain fabrics thing. Or maybe it was even a coping mechanism I developed to deal with the other coping mechanism I’d developed where my body had to be physically ‘balanced’ all the time, and I’d end up driving myself even crazier by touching opposite sides of my body to try to compensate for moments where one side would get a sensation while another side wouldn’t thus rendering me ‘imbalanced’. I was especially sensitive to this when I was anxious or upset. (I used to wonder if this was an OCD thing but I was never diagnosed with it so probably not.)

None of this is to say that I don’t physically feel pain, or groping hands in packed out bars; I bloody do, and these sensations scream so loudly in my head that they more than make up for the lack of sensation at all other times. But I don’t feel the little things anymore; the things that help situate you in a physical space.

It might be linked to the things I mentioned earlier, or it might not. Don’t think I’ll ever really know. But it makes me feel really out of place, even within my own body. Like, I’ve never fit in anywhere anyway, so at least being a stranger in my own body is consistent, I guess.