written in the body

not intellectualizing

Albert York, Farm Landscape, 1970

Housekeeping: we had a Typeform error with the matchmaking survey and got over 1000 responses. We’re only matching 1000 people in the first batch, so if you’re part of the overflow you should get an email from me this week letting you know that we’ll match you in the next round. I am sorry for the wait but we want to make sure we’re only taking on what we can handle! Otherwise, you should receive an email with your match(es) in the next 1.5 to 2 weeks. I also want to plan some kind of in-person event next month after people receive their matches so stay tuned :)

I used to not understand attention or energy, how to direct it, how to keep it in and how to project it out. I was still affected by it, I just wasn’t in my body enough to notice how. I couldn’t name the simplest things—X stresses me out because he brings so much anxious energy to our interaction. Y feels untrustworthy because she’s saying one thing but her body is saying another. I make people feel neglected when I’m a party and I turn all my attention inwards.

Noticing all of this would’ve required me noticing a few things about myself. When I want something, I breathe more shallowly. When I’m angry, I barely breathe at all. It’s hard for me to make eye contact with new people, it feels too intense. I’d rather be uncomfortable than impolite too much of the time. I feel ashamed when I say no. I feel ashamed with other people say no to me. When I receive a compliment, I always want to deflect it. I’m easy to anger, but I trap the anger instead of letting it escape.

I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.

I couldn’t see my own patterns. Or I saw them but I couldn’t feel them. You changed my life because when I met you my mind and my body were so totally at odds that I started noticing things. My mind distrusted you but my body instantly felt safe. And I could not square the two, I could not make the two arrive at the same place no matter what I did, and this made me feel insane. I started inadvertently rattling around the confines of my cage.

By that time I had enough facility to start doing it for other people. People who would find me in moments of crisis and I would say: I don’t think you really like what you’re doing. I think that you are faking this. It was preverbal, it was in their shoulders and faces, I couldn’t articulate even what I was noticing. I could do it pretty instantly with other people but it was so much harder to do it for myself. The voice in my head gets so loud.

My body is so cool. When I’m in it the world feels totally different, everything is more intense in a good way and I don’t feel numbed out. I feel calm and relaxed and capable. I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people. Like I can notice that whenever you’re stressed you stop eating. Or when someone talks too fast because they’re manic in love. Sometimes when I’m in my body enough I can even explain things, though usually you can’t tell anyone anything. I think the trick is that people pick up more on your energy than they do on your words.

So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.” Living in your head instead of your body means always being three steps behind what’s obvious to everyone else.

For a long time, the primary thing I agonized over was my own uncertainty. How can I make the right decision about a relationship? How do I know what to do for work, and where to live, and which friends to reach out to? How do I know if I’m in the wrong or you are? Am I being unreasonable? I relied on external signs to help me piece it together. What does my best friend think? How many times have you texted me today? What does the psychology textbook tell me? And what about Reddit? And Twitter? It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright. If you’re okay, then I’m allowed to be okay. When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment. I could see for the first time the distinction between us—that you were scared, but I didn’t have to be. I don’t have to spend my whole life asking for permission.