For most of my life, I was oblivious to my body as anything other than a carapace for my head and my cock. In my early 40s, I woke up and realized that not only did this dissociative construction rob me of much, but it simply failed to capture my lived experience. Pretty much everything that happened in my body was lost on me. I didn’t feel much in the way of discomfort or comfort. I was insensitive to variations in my interior landscape.
Nowadays that’s not so true. As I dictate this, biking along my morning route, my right shoulder is a familiar locus of a nervy, aching, radiating pain emanating from a disc problem in my cervical spine. My lower back aches as it always does from a surgery over a decade ago — a surgery which left me with some nerve pain by my left ribs where the incision was made by the doctor. My knees, which most of the time ache and throb in my current circumstance, are actually soothed by the rhythmic up and down and gentle glide of pedaling the gently e-assisted bike on which I’m passing through my city. My eyes, slightly crusty with last night’s sleep still, are cooled by the wind. My hands are a little sweaty on the handlebars. My ass chafes slightly on the too-hard seat, and my cock feels little sparkly, tingly promises of future excitement.
That’s not everything, but it begins to capture a sensitivity to my bodily experience that I missed out on for far too long.
But here’s something else. I wear a Fitbit watch — not because I’m particularly curious about the data it might provide, or rather, not because any such curiosity that I once had persists, but rather because I’ve become accustomed to it, and so I don’t take it off. Mostly I use it to tell me what time it is. Occasionally I consult it to see the data, and 80% of the time, what I see validates my felt experience. Yes, that’s right, my heart rate has been a little bit lower. Yes, that’s right, I did sleep well last night. Or yes, that’s right, my sleep was shit.
But 20% of the time, I have a different experience. I look at the watch, or the app, and I think: nope, that’s not what’s happening in my body. The watch is wrong.
In my previous dissociative state, I imagine I might well have credited the watch over my own perception. Today, though, I’m not in doubt. I don’t think that the watch is right when it’s not.
Today, for example, it would have me believe that I’m at ease — that my resting heart rate reflects a level of placidity and tranquility that is unusual for me. This is incorrect. My resting heart rate may well be 60, which is within 3 or 4 beats of my general healthy lowest level, and to the extent that my resting heart rate is a proxy for my relaxation, calm, or stresslessness, in general, I think that’s right. I will say, though: today I am somewhat dysregulated. Maybe it’s not reflected in my heart rate, but I can feel it in a variety of other ways.
Featured image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, overcast morning light with a greenish-grey cast. A wrist rests close and sharp in the lower-left foreground — a Fitbit face glowing a calm, clinical blue, displaying a low heart rate — while in the soft middle distance, slightly out of focus, a man’s bare torso leans over handlebars, the musculature of his back faintly tense, the posture wrong for someone whose watch insists he is at ease. The city street behind him is wet, light smearing off the asphalt. The blue glow is too serene for what the body is quietly doing.
Bottom image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, overcast morning light with a greenish-grey cast. A wrist rests close and sharp in the lower-left foreground — a Fitbit face glowing a calm, clinical blue, displaying a low heart rate — while in the soft middle distance, slightly out of focus, a man’s bare torso leans over handlebars, the musculature of his back faintly tense, the posture wrong for someone whose watch insists he is at ease. The city street behind him is wet, light smearing off the asphalt. The blue glow is too serene for what the body is quietly doing.