Exile from my own body, II

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?

(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

Well, yes, he is writing about the Civil War. Still, the new Terrence Malick movie, The Tree of Life, gives us permission to understand our pathetic little lives in cosmic terms. So the Civil War as analogue for the struggle of the middle-aged woman for mental and physical equilibrium - maybe it isn't quite so outrageous as it seems. Anyway, we have been borrowing from Walt Whitman to think about female mental anguish since Now Voyager.

Exiled from my own body, afraid to be alone, go to bed, take a shower, remove my shoes, afraid of anything that might force me to touch my own skin that does not respond, to feel dead flesh. Sitting seems to pinch the nerves running down my legs, teasing little tingles in my toes, creating a hypersensitive spot on my ankle, and other horrors. I am afraid to sit. I am afraid to lie down. I am afraid.

These are past pains, the fears of 2011. I have been nutty with pain and fear this past year.

However, this is the New Year. In 2012 I am part of my own body: I am with myself, in myself, integrated with myself. My breath is a bridge, connecting me to myself, connecting me to the universe. My fingers massage the pressure points in my legs, establishing harmony. My body is not an alien thing, but a perfectly tuned instrument that I play with my breath. This is the New Year, this a new world.

This is simply menopause, right? The dizziness, detachment, sense of doom - this is all part of it, right? I am not truly dying, right? No, no, all will be well. This is a new year. A year of getting better.