Presenting The Responsive Body
In which I present The Responsive Body project, some personal history, and what I hope to achieve in writing publicly.
This newsletter comes from a need for me to write in public. The project explores the relationships between my body (as more than flesh-and-bone) and its contexts. I am driven by an impulse to make sense of my world.
The Responsive Body follows one such previous project which I named The Transfusion, that ran for over a year during the early COVID-19 Pandemic. The explicit purpose of The Transfusion as a project was to create and distribute knowledge about myself, about the archive of my medical history, about the indecent paradoxes of so-called healthcare in Canada and Quebec. The time period during which The Transfusion ran (first as a newsletter, then a blog, then a series of private drafts on my local hard-drive) as a progressively less-accessible and more chaotic accumulation of words led to some published writing, and many still unedited works. I was by-and-large conducting an archaeological dig of my own trauma.
In The Transfusion, I set the groundwork that led me to my first full-length manuscript pertaining to illness, queerness, and being raised as a sick child. That book project continues privately to this day. I took what I had learned about writing over the course of The Transfusion and published Sickness in Limbo, as well as notes from assistant-managing a dietary supplements store, and then went largely offline. When I stopped writing publicly, my health was in a difficult position.
The time devoted to writing about sickness helped me to transmute a project about chronic illness into a project of continual remission. From a commitment to a diagnosis, and many confused attempts to understand, came a volte-face towards a committed process of healing.
I received my diagnosis of a auto-immune bleeding disorder known as Chronic Immune Thrombocytopenia in 2001, at the age of 5. From that point on, it followed me my entire life. From March 2018 until late 2021, I underwent 32 blood tests with wildly varying results. I was taking meds that cost over 40 thousand Canadian dollars per year in taxpayer money and required the renewal of medical authorization every 6 months. I autonomously weaned myself off them, and stopped using Revolade™ in March 2022, after over 7 years of near-daily consumption. Now, twenty-two years later after a blood doctor first asserted knowledge about me, I haven't set foot in a hospital since December of 2021. I am currently in remission, and at 27 I enjoy my body more than I ever have.
Through a process of listening to my needs, to my body's particular wisdom, I am each day healing. When I last went under an intravenous treatment, I awoke the next day to a complete and total awareness that the situation was untenable, that I could not go on as I had been. I was already searching, looking for someone somewhere to help. I took matters further. My single, uncompromising priority became finding a path to health.
The term "responsive body" came to my attention in Cynthia J. Novack's 1996 anthropological study Sharing The Dance, where she writes:
the image of the responsive body, which is not a mere reflex action but a mode of being in which the person is most in accord with natural law, constitutes a central symbol of contact improvisation. The concept of the responsive body is not a simple description of how the body is to be used in the dance form; it stands for an entire fabric of meanings. Ideally, the responsive body represents honesty, reality, spirituality, and the suppression of selfish, egotistical striving. At the same time, since the responsive body is the person, allowing the responsive body to act is felt to reveal the individual in a profound way. (p. 185-186)
My project here is to expand Cynthia Novack's idea of the "responsive body" beyond the periphery of contact improvisation.
I want to represent my reality honestly, accounting for my spiritual journey, my healing, my core beliefs. I want to decry the outrage I feel about the greed that permeates the fabric of my society. I wish to share in earnest about how it is that I was so sick and have come to enjoy such a bounty of gifts, how my body has responded to years of careful decisions made with the singular goal of healing.
The responsive body is long, elongating, elastic, extending, full of spaciousness, inviting openness. I am embarking on this project with little in the way of a plan. I have realized that any attempt on my part to precisely map out a timeline is doomed to fail ahead of time. The goal is to open opportunities of dialog, because I have learned that it is in conversation that fruitful thought is most likely to come about. So I will be making this up as I go along, with the aim of publishing once every two weeks, with an idea presented succinctly in each post.
So I choose a newsletter/blog format, because of its iterative nature. Here, I can make assertions and refute them the following week. I can share my story, hear yours, and find common ground. I can tend to ideas and nurture their growth little by little, the way I might look at a public garden. Perhaps above all, my aim is to enjoy this process. Without that, I'll stop, retreat again, focus on healing.
Yours,
Laure