The Body is a Story

I recently noticed that my left outer ankle looked swollen, right around the bone. I felt it with my hand and there was no tenderness, yet there was so much padding around it, like really thick skin. I also noticed it was very slightly rougher than the rest of the skin around my foot, and I realized it was a callus. I obsessed over it for a bit, and determined it must weirdly be from my shoes or something, although that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I exfoliated it in the shower and put some lotion on it before bed for a few nights. 

The following week, while Zooming with a client, I noticed that I was sitting in my chair with my left shin tucked under my right thigh. A half cross-legged seat.  That’s when it dawned on me. I sit cross legged when I work at my desk, when I sit in a chair to eat, when sit on the floor to teach a class. And being a human with habits, I always sit the same way, left tucked under right, so that my left ankle is bearing the contact with the sitting surface. I have been habitually sitting this way, now that I think about it, for quite a long time. Yet, incredibly, I had never paid attention. I only noticed it now because a week earlier I accidentally looked down and saw it, felt it, formed an opinion about it, wondered about its origin, and cared for it. It became part of my conscious radar. 

So, my callus was not from my shoes. If I wanted to get rid of my callus, it wasn’t going to be salt scrub and lotion, which is a passive bandaid fix. I’d have to actively change my habits to get right down to the root of it.

I’ve now begun to tuck my right shin under my left, not because I’m so concerned with a rough patch on my ankle, but more because I’d like to get to a point where I can cross my legs either way comfortably. It doesn’t come naturally. I cross my habitual way without thinking. The moment I become aware of my body for whatever reason, I switch the cross. 

Every single part of our bodies tells a story. Every wrinkle on our face, the shape of our knuckles, every callus/corn/scab, every varicose vein and stretch mark, every ache and pain, every bone density scan, every illness, every movement we choose to make and every movement we choose not to make is a story of our lives. We’re not born with the musculoskeletal bodies we have now. We are born with the beginnings of bones and surrounding musculature that are ready to be molded like clay into their shape. The way we wore diapers, were handled by our parents, the speed at which we developed movement patterns, the influence our parents had over that speed, our school sports, the city we lived in, the type of home we lived in, the confidence or lack thereof we had in our physical appearance, our first sexual experiences, even the clothes we wore were all influenced our bodies and helped determine the things we continued to do with them after adolescence. Every single thing afterwards, up until this moment, also shapes our bodies, albeit at a slower speed than our youth. (There’s even an entire scientific field of study, the science of epigenetics, devoted to understanding how the genes we’re born with are expressed differently depending on how we live our lives.)

It is a beautiful thing, these bodies that tell stories if we’re willing to listen. Every single day that we are alive, we are continuing to write the story of our body. What are you choosing to write?