I would be a cyborg if I could

I often joke that I would be a cyborg if I could. Joke, but with the tone of lolsob, like I’m saying this trite thing but I mean it. I mean both the laugh and the cry of it. It’s so long since I’ve felt pleasure in my body that I would be a cyborg if I could, a machine designed to function, and mend-able, instead of a body that is already falling apart without much hope of being fixed, merely patched up temporarily. A body that requires so much effort to use.

A body is not an easy thing to live in for many of us. We come by them honestly. They’re all we ever know, it’s the only permanent thing we have. We can’t shrug them off and try a new one out for the day. There’s no trial period. Any substantial changes to a body are hard won or hard fought, either triumphantly achieved or painfully forced upon us. The minor changes often happen without obvious cause, except the natural progression of time which means one day it’s not as easy to get up off the ground and you find yourself buying B-vitamins and fish oil supplements and you wonder how you ever stayed up all night dancing or finishing that lab report that was worth 7% of your grade.

If you don’t think about your body very often, congratulations. You’re either blessed with one that works well, or you’ve done the work to make it more functional, or you’ve done the work to not let thinking about your body overtake other things in life. (Or you’re young. Even though I’ve been chronically ill since I was a child, I didn’t think about my body a lot either when I was in my twenties.)