LP Thoon’s definition of anatta: “Nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Had really stuck with me and I once again turned my attention to trying to prove my items don’t belong to me. I figured the more clearly I could see that, the more clearly I could also answer his question, “meaningless how?”.

I got to thinking back to an old contemplation on puberty. I was so disturbed when I hit puberty and my body started changing, I was not at all keen on trading my stick figure for curves. I realize now that the root of my deep despair was that I didn’t feel like the new body was mine, it didn’t reflect me, it didn’t align with my vision of myself.

Of course, after a few weeks moping (eternity in teenage time), I ‘got over it’; I accepted my body changing by adjusting my sense of who I was, my future expectations, to fit this post-puberty body, and I was back to worrying over normal teeny-bopper dramas, rather than having extreme body distress. In fact, now that I am edging toward the peri-menopause years, oh what I wouldn’t do to cling to this post-pubescent-pre-menopause body just a little longer…

The truth is, over and over again, our bodies (and other belongings) don’t just fail to live up to our expectations, they actually defy our sense of who we are.

Another example: When I was first diagnosed with asthma, I was at my peak fitness level — I worked out 4 hours a day, obsessed over my reps and maxes, I lived and breathed to be fit — and yet there I was huffing and puffing 5 minutes into a light run. For all my efforts, for all my self-proclaimed fitness, my body was non-compliant; this body didn’t care what I wanted to be, who I thought I was, or even the work I put into promulgating that identity, its elements shifted into a state of disease and all the training/willing/imagining in the world wasn’t allowing me to finish my run.

If possible, I try and ‘fix it’, to force my body into states that feel reflect who I think I am: I buy spanx for the muffin top, botox to the brow, engage in extreme workouts and diets, take those daily asthma meds, even knowing full well how painfully temporary these ‘fixes’ are. Often though, like with puberty, or disease, there is no ‘fix’, and I have to go through the agonizing process of shifting my sense of self to align with reality.

Why not stop to ask myself the obvious question: If my body can defy my sense of self, sabotage my dreams for the future, can it really be mine? Or how about the question: How can a body be ‘who I am’ if it doesn’t actually reflect who I think I am, or who I want to be?

At the end of the day, I want to be born in this world to actualize the story of self. The desire to be and become is what drives me forward. But even my body, the thing closest to me isn’t, actually actualizing my story of self. If it were, then all the efforting, all the imagining, all the curating of a fit-alana wouldn’t be gasping for breath 5 minutes into a run.

I curate memories of past, solidify current characteristics that I value, and imagine future fantasies, to create a continuous narrative I can claim as ‘me’. I use rupa as props, to sell my story to myself, to augur signs of my success/ failure meeting the benchmarks of ‘the me I want to be’. If an object, a body, can undermine my story, if rather than confirming me it shouts the erroneousness of my assumed identity, that object isn’t me, it is ‘against me’.
The objects can’t be mine because they don’t do what ‘I hired them to do’, what I so desperately want and need them to do –these objects don’t confirm me. These objects don’t buy me the future I imagine. I cling so tightly to them, I suffer for their ‘option value’, but over and over they prove that having them doesn’t get me the future I want. In the case of a body, having it gets me a future I decisively don’t want: Aging, sickness, death.

What is more is the very fact that I need to re-adjust my sense of self, as I did with puberty, proves that my identity isn’t inherent in the body at all, it’s just a self-created construct I overlay onto the 4e object. The fact that my muffin top pops back as soon as the spanx come off and that botox wears off in lockdown, is a blatant testament that my ‘fixes’ are temporary, ‘my objects’ are like every other object, bound by the law of impermanence. And maybe this is part of what LP Thoon means when he calls these objects ‘meaningless’ – if the only meaning in an object is the one that we superimpose onto it, that shifts as we shift, isn’t it devoid of any inherent meaning. Meaningless.

And how do I reconcile the idea that I am ‘author’ of my story, master of myself and my narrative, when I can’t even force my body to be what I want it to be? Instead, the body forces me to adjust, I had to adjust my imagined sense of self with puberty, I had to adjust my workouts to asthma. Since Covid began, my whole life revolves around protecting and preserving this body. Instead of being a tool to actualize myself and my dreams, to maximize my pleasure and satisfaction, this body is a hindrance to me doing what I want to do; it is the cause of story-interruptus, my 18 month lockdown devoid of humans, and hobbies, and the fulfillment of my dreams.

It’s not just that this body isn’t me, does not affirm me, if I look closely this body betrays the idea of the free and powerful me I want to be. On this body I am reliant, I am bound, I am forced to yield and to compromise, and with its cessation, this chapter of the story I so carefully curated, was born and suffered to write, comes to a whimpering close.