My Strange Body

When I was tiny, I hated the thing enclosed in always-too-large clothes that hung like sacks off me. Cloth bags drowning the emaciated and miserable vessel within.

Now that I am big, I feel that I take up too much space in this world. Shadows where there should be none. This softness is not who I am.

But the disenchantment extends deeper than the external Markov blanket that encases me. It is not even a dissatisfaction with the aesthetics of somatic representation. It is a core and fundamental feature of the thing that characterises all inner states of my experience: nothing that I will ever do or be will suffice. For it will never be good enough, whatever it is. And perhaps the easiest thing to blame is the thing that is visually observable, a thing that I can touch and grab and despise: this strange body that I inhabit. I fleshed out the shell but I am no fuller for it.

How can I be angry with a house that knows nothing of itself except what I project onto it? How will I ever forgive these self-assembled atoms for what they have become?