My hip hurts, and I cry, sometimes to the point of a panic attack. My hip hurts, but it feels like more than that: my mind hurts, my body hurts, my heart hurts, and my being hurts. Amidst the messy throuple between myself, my mind, and my body, I often forget that I am somehow alive, sewn between the two of them. I do not like the feeling of being forgotten, in pain, or out of control over my own life. These uneasy feelings were a stimulus for some uneasy questions I have been obsessing about recently.
Where does my body stop and my mind begin? How do physiological pain and pleasure differ from psychological—do they even differ at all? If not, am I just a jumble of tired thoughts and jarring joints eventually going to submit to sedation?
Although these questions tend to spiral me into abyssal pools of philosophical readings and existentialism, I still struggle to find my own answers, not only to these questions but to why I am hurting.
I wasted an absurd number of weeks contorting and twisting my body in front of mirrors throughout my adolescence, figuring out the science to make myself look smaller. I would take several minutes each morning to gaze unenthusiastically at how my body presented itself, obsessively pigeon-toeing my feet towards each other, pressing my thighs to the back of the room, and trying to envision my legs with a thigh gap.
My mind hated my hips the most, paradoxically blaming them for somehow being too wide and not wide enough. I desperately wanted to carve them and my thighs into twig-like chopsticks, leaving vacant space for someone else to fill. My consciousness squirmed when I noticed my stomach in the mirror, wanting it to disappear, letting it sink deeper and deeper into my rib cage until there was no place left to digest food. I straightened my hair every day, praying that maybe if I burned it enough, it would never poof back up into its tangled ball of culture and resilience. Even with all this manipulation and maneuvering, my body would always collapse back to its original shape like a rubber band, unable to be thinly stretched. This resistance infuriated me, so I tried harder to hammer down my hips and bury my body.
In time, I learned how to cheat my body’s system, depriving it of food and exhausting it with exercise. I started to walk with my thighs spread apart from each other, keeping my hips locked and my gait wide. My hips tried to relax, begging me to stop putting them in the middle of my mind’s complex-driven conquest. But I was too terrified to hear them plead, terrified of being hated by the cruel boys in my class who wanted someone emptier than I was. They wanted someone who had room to hold their salacious desires, a sponge they could saturate with selfish attempts to inflate their egos.
My mother would tell me that society’s ideal body type was unattainable and far from realistic. I wanted so badly to believe her, but instead of doubting society, I doubted myself. I blamed myself for not looking like the girls in magazines instead of blaming the magazines for telling me that I needed to change. I became so fixated on this feeling of inadequacy that I worked every day to make it go away, desperately trying to morph and mold my body into a shape that it didn’t want to be in. A star trying to fit into a circular cookie-cutter. A girl who changed her walk, the shape of her hips, to feed her mind’s insatiable desires.
After years of this, my feelings of inadequacy only grew and grew. These feelings of shame and grief motivated me to project my anger even more onto my body. I not only began to hate the way my body looked, but I also hated the idea of having a body altogether.
I tried to forget I had a body and dreamed of floating away from the skin vessel that caged me in, leaving my hips to rot on the earth’s floorboards. I became so hyper-focused on what my mind wanted, I neglected to notice my body’s needs. It felt like my mind and I were up in the clouds, laughing as we watched my body beg us to return to the ground. I became a bully to my body because I craved more and more control over myself. This went on for years, and I finally felt untouchable from my body’s disappointments. At least, I thought I was untouchable until I developed chronic pain in my left hip.
This pain forced me to fall from the sky and return to my body. My hips were finally taking back their control over my mind, ensuing a discomfort disorientating enough to wake me from my daze. My hip pain has peaks and valleys but is always present enough for me to notice that something is wrong. It pops in and out of place, pinches, pulls, throbs, yells, cries and begs me to treat it better. My hips hate the way I made them walk. They hate the pressure I put on them to feel better, look better, be better. This pain felt like their revenge.
It has been a couple of years since my hip pain started. Nowadays, I often am seen stretching my hip over to the side or placing my hand around my upper thigh, trying to squeeze out the discomfort. My close friends have become very used to me complaining about my hip, especially after I was diagnosed with a labrum tear and snapping IT band. However, I have begun noticing that I complain about my hip even when it doesn’t hurt.
Throughout the past year, my hip has become an umbrella term for any type of pain, whether physical, mental, or emotional. If I’m stressed about school work, I’ll rush into my house and exhale, “My hip hurts.” If I’m depressed because I feel inadequate, I’ll look over to my friend and say, “Ow, my hip is killing me today.” Or when I am anxious and feel my nervous system shaking inside of me, I’ll email my teachers and explain, “I can’t make it into class today; my hip hurts too bad.” I have become so afraid of telling people what my mind is thinking that I have begun relying on my body to validate my pain.
My hip hurts, and I cry, but it’s more than that. I am hurting, and I don’t want to explain the emotional turmoil circling my chest. Instead, I describe it as something tangible, an uncomfortable feeling that I wish could be massaged out of me. By combining my pain into one epicenter spiraling around my hip socket, I am making my physiological and psychological problems worse. They have begun feeding off each other and feel so similar now that I can’t differentiate the pain.
This realization, although extremely upsetting, gave me the answer to my question: my hip is where my body and mind meet. They have trauma bonded together, using each other as emotional punching bags. My mind hates my body for not looking different, and my body hates my mind for being too afraid to speak its truth. My mind made me a bully, and my body made me pathetic. I resent them both for making me feel like I exist for them, not alongside them. They are connected, but like a failing marriage that craves a divorce, they won’t pursue it because they have a child.
The other day, my therapist asked me if I loved my hips. Unfortunately, I feel quite the opposite. Not only do I hate my hips, but I realized I still hate having a body. I hate being draped in flesh, forced to nourish and cleanse it, or else it’ll dissipate along with my mind—a connection so powerful that they cannot live or die without one another.
I told my therapist that even though I still hate my body, I hate the idea of hating my body even more. My entire life, I have been poking, prodding, and provoking my body to become something different. I am so tired of it, tired of how little I try to love myself and listen to what my body needs. Ideally, I told her, I want my mind to love my body and my body to forgive my mind because then maybe I’ll finally inhabit a space filled with mutual respect, care, support, and safety.
After my session, I curled up into a ball, hugged my hands around my thighs, allowed tears to fall from my cheeks, and told my hips how sorry I was. I told them I wanted to love them and that I would try harder not to blame them anymore for all the pain I had been suppressing. That’s when I felt a release of hot tension in my hip joint as if it was a peace offering from my body to my mind. I sat there, hugging myself for an hour, basking in the least amount of pain I had felt all year. My mind and body felt properly reconnected, holding each other’s pain while they both wrapped their arms around me. I then took one last deep breath, stood up from the floor, and let my thighs naturally kiss each other as I walked out of the room.