Stop relying on that body-ody-ody

Hey there. How are you? Welcome to this crazy little thing called life. Or welcome back. Or sorry you clicked on the wrong link and are now very confused about what you’re reading. Whatever brought you here today, welcome. Let’s get started, shall we?

So if you follow me on any form of social media, chances are you’ve seen my pretty-much-almost-naked body. It’s true; I’ve been known to post a shirtless and/or pantless pic on the gram from time to time. I’m a gay man. Just like a shark needs to keep moving to stay alive so do I require that other men validate my physical appearance at least weekly, lest I perish. Yes, it’s vain, I’m aware.

If you follow me on any form of social media, then you also know that I have been living with a sometimes-debilitating chronic pain disorder for the past 5 years. I post about it a lot (hence this entire blog dedicated to life with chronic pain) and I try to be open about my experiences in the hopes of helping and connecting with others who are also struggling.

Living with chronic pain means that I have a sometimes-complicated relationship with my body. Who am I kidding it’s always complicated. I guess I always have had this kind of relationship with my body in one way or another, but the past 5 years have presented a host of challenges that have forced me to really look at the way I view and feel about my body.

To really get into this, we need to back up a little bit. Like back to my childhood. That’s right people, we’re going there. My relationship with my body was distorted at an early age as I internalized what I learned in Catholic school. What?!?!? Catholicism negatively impacted someone’s view of themselves/their body!?!?! Call the presses! Revolutionary! NOT. I grew up with a limited concept of health and nutrition and so that aspect of physical health never really crossed my mind. When I really think about it, the church was actually the first place that I learned that my body had other functions, primarily sexual functions *GASP*. That’s right, I never knew that my body could give and receive sexual pleasure until the church told me how bad it was to do so. Ironic, isn’t it?

So being that I started to understand and process very abstract and metacognitive concepts like heaven, hell, purgatory, death, and the existential meaning of life by the time I was in elementary school, it follows that I internalized the fear and shame around my body’s sexual capacity. Add to that being closeted and it really just compounded things. The consequence of internalizing shame about my body’s sexual capacity was that I started to view my body negatively overall and in addition to becoming ashamed of my body/physical-ness, I also became afraid of it. So began the long-standing existential battle between my mental and my physical self.

As I got older, I continued to harbor a lot of shame and fear around physical intimacy, which only got worse as puberty hit, hormones started raging, and my sexuality became less and less escapable. Around the same time, I started playing sports. As I said before, we never really talked much about health and nutrition growing up, and so it was sports that really opened the avenue for viewing my body from a standpoint of physical capability, strength, and stamina. Eventually, my athletic career would take me all the way to the Division I level at Boston University where I competed with some of the best athletes in the country.

At BU, I got stronger, faster, and overall more physically fit/capable than I ever had been in my life and probably ever will be again. The things I could do when I was in my prime at BU are baffling to me now. But then again, training a few hours a day, six days a week, all year round will do that to you. What I didn’t realize at the time was that just as the church had warped my relationship with the sexual part of my body, sports inadvertently impacted my view of the physical part of my body. Because I was competing at such a high level and because I was so committed to my sport, I came to understand that my body’s value lay solely in how much it could do: how fast it could run, how high it could jump, how much it could lift, how long it could last in a tough workout. My life revolved around how I could make my body function at a higher level physically and anything that deterred that like time off or injury caused me a lot of anxiety.

So by the end of college, I was terrified of my body from both a sexual and generally physical level. SUPER DUPER! Don’t worry, it gets worse. Around this time is when I started to slowly inch my way out of the proverbial closet. I can remember a friend of mine in college responding to my explaining that I might be gay by telling me, “Don’t worry, gay men will love you, look at your body!” Yea, you might be able to see how this is gonna go. So my first thought about coming out and my first understanding of being gay was that I would be valued for my body. And I was. Once again, I was training/competing at the DI collegiate level so my body was looking tight and right. And so when I started going to gay bars, I would make sure to take my shirt off and revel in the attention paid by the men around me. The attention I got at the bars, the fact that I was able to compete athletically at a DI school (which also garnered praise and attention), and the fact that I was surrounded by people who viewed their bodies the same way all affirmed for me that my worth as a person was directly linked to my body and what it could do.

Imagine my dismay, then, when a few weeks after graduating from college, I started to experience the beginnings of what would become a 5-year battle with debilitating chronic pain. All of a sudden, I couldn’t exercise anymore. At first, I just couldn’t run, so I would lift and cycle. Then my hips couldn’t handle the cycling anymore. Then my muscles couldn’t handle the lifting anymore. Eventually, it got so bad that I could barely walk a half-mile without ending up in excruciating pain. I would get so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t eat for days at a time and spent half my time in the bathroom. I could feel my muscles tightening and spasming more and more each day. Then I couldn’t sit any more. Sitting for more than 30 minutes would tighten my hips and back muscles to the point of tears. Then I couldn’t sleep on my back anymore.

And seemingly worst of all, sex became INTENSELY PAINFUL. As the muscles in my hips and back tightened, my pelvis responded in kind, becoming hypertonic. Now when I say that sex was painful, I mean PAINFUL, the whole ordeal. Even just getting hard became painful as my pelvic floor muscles fired and sent shockwaves through my body. When I would orgasm, I could literally feel lightning bolts of pain shoot up through my torso and I’d immediately become so nauseas, I thought I would throw up. That pain would linger, sometimes for a few days, sometimes a week.

And so I stopped doing everything. I stopped exercising. I stopped having sex. I stopped masturbating. I stopped using my body for all the things that gave me the attention and value I had come to require from others and from myself. And in turn, I started to unravel. What was my body worth if it couldn’t do anything? What was I worth if I couldn’t do anything. By day, I was a special education teacher, preaching to my students that their differences made them unique and in no way made them lesser than anyone else. And yet, I did not extend that belief to my own body and myself.

In truth, my chronic pain has brought to light the toxic relationship I have had with my body for years and is challenging me to reframe that relationship. It is when I feel my worst that the worst realities of this toxic relationship become clear. When I am stuck at home, sick and lying on my heating pad, I think a lot of things, which usually include some variation of:

• I hate this so much.

• I can’t do anything I want to do.

• My life would be so much better if I wasn’t in pain.

• My body is useless.

• I hate my body.

• Who would want to be with someone who is sick all the time?

• Who would want to be with someone who can’t travel?

• Who would want to be with someone who can’t have sex regularly?

And the list goes on and on. As you can see, one of the areas of my life most impacted is my relationships. I am very cautious when it comes to dating. In fact, for a while I just figured I wouldn’t. What was the point, I thought. No one would want to deal with any of this. I don’t want to so why would someone else willingly bring it into their life? When I did decide to start dating, I carefully screened potential suitors based on whether or not I thought they could handle my chronic illness. I’ve said no to a number of otherwise nice men because I thought there was no way they could hang. They said they could, but I could just tell they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

On the chance that I do find someone who I think can handle my situation, I find myself constantly battling that nagging voice in the back of my head that tells me they will eventually leave because it will get too hard, too complicated. They’ll want more sex from me than I can physically give, they’ll want to travel somewhere farther than I can go, they’ll want to do all the things I used to love to do like hike and run 5ks and go kayaking, and I won’t be able to physically do it, and they will leave. It has happened before. Men who thought they could manage learned that they couldn’t and walked away. While I can’t blame any of them, it’s a sting that hurts more than pretty much anything I’ve felt before. To know someone left because of what you aren’t and what you can’t give them is devastating.

So circling back to the beginning of this long entry, I post shirtless pics from time to time. I’ve even gotten so bold as to put some more risqué material out there on social media. And I do this for a couple of reasons. For one, I still value validation for my body. Even though I know it’s shallow and even though I know it feeds a toxic relationship, I recognize that this is still something that I value, even though I probably shouldn’t so much.

I also post these pictures to remind myself of my resilience. After 5 years of chronic pain and illness and constantly/rapidly gaining and losing weight and muscle spasms and ups/downs, I like to look at my body and value its resilience in the face of pain. In truth, most of the time, I take these pictures when I am feeling my worst to remind myself and others that the exterior does not always reflect what is going on inside. You see a shot of my sculpted abs, but they look that way because they are in spasm, one that is so blindingly bad, it is constricting my breathing and my intestines. And so sometimes I post these pictures to help me as I try to reframe my belief that my body is broken to the belief that my body is strong – and that strength is different from the strength I used to value. I take these pictures so that I can value my body, but remind myself that my value does not reside solely in my body.

In all, my chronic pain has really forced me to evaluate the relationship I have with my body and the value I place on physicality as a whole. I have grown up believing that my body is the only valuable part of myself, ignoring my work ethic, compassion, amiability, and all other aspects of what make me who I am. In working through this, I see how deeply entrenched I am in a culture of ableism, despite purporting to be an advocate for ability justice. I thought just because I never felt this way about anyone else, it was ok. But if I truly believe that my situation makes me and my body and my existence useless because my body is differently abled, then ableism has a stronger hold on me than I am willing to see.

This journey is a long one. Some days I make progress. Other days I take seven steps back. But I am trying. I am working to reframe my self-worth and my value. I am working to see my body as strong and resilient, rather than broken and useless. I am working to see a relationship with me as an adventure, rather than something that isn’t worth anyone’s time. I am working to dig into the other parts of myself and celebrate them. I am working, I am trying. So here’s to the struggle, my friends.

Peace and love,

Adam