On Having a Body You Don’t Want

Heidi S.
5 min readOct 24, 2021
Photo by Inge Poelman on Unsplash

I’m trying to be okay with being in my own body.

It’s a work in progress, made more difficult by the steady march of age.

Usually when I think about my body, I feel resentful. My body mostly feels like this thing I’m forced to lug around with me. It hurts sometimes, most of the time really, in the joints of my hands and knees, in the muscles of my neck and upper back, in my skull. My hamstrings always feel too tight, like a tangle of knots against the back of my legs. When I get too cold, my brain interprets cold as pain, so I ache from the inside out half the year.

But more than this, my body usually doesn’t feel like mine.

It doesn’t feel like me.

Part of this is tied up with my lack of a strong affinity to gender. My body doesn’t look like how I feel — separate from gender. I have a hard time finding clothes for it that I feel comfortable in as myself.

Gender is a social category that I feel like exists for other people, and there isn’t a body I could inhabit that others won’t try to assign a gender to. And I resent that the presentation of your body has social meaning that I don’t want to be a part of. I don’t want people to look at me and gender me as a woman and then dump all of their misogyny (external or internalized) onto me. I don’t want people to make…

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Heidi S.

PhD in philosophy | Feminist | Anarchist | Pop culture junkie | Kpop listener | Actually Autistic