On What Is Or Isn’t Owned

or, “The Human Body Is the Most Inhuman Thing in the World”

I began making a concerted effort a number of years ago to cease referring to the body I inhabit as ‘mine’. The application of the possessive in relation to that of embodiment feels as much of a mental imposition as it already is an imposition physically, a learned and inhabited habit I outwardly reject, an ownership I’ve never felt and have never wanted, a relationship linguistically reinforced and utterly alienating.

Habit often overrides will by nature, cruelly, reflexively. That concerted effort is not an easy thing, decades of the ingrained refusing to yield to intention. There is a particular wretchedness in looking at these hands — these hands, not my hands — and recognizing them as foreign objects. There is one worse in catching oneself reflexively acknowledging them as otherwise, this subconscious betrayal of agency in something so mundane, intuitively understood, oft-ignored. The former is horrible in understanding or acknowledging an injustice, or an insult, or a fundamental wrongness. The latter’s agony comes from that understanding and acknowledgement being insufficient; an unbroken conditioning despite all to the contrary.

Agency exercised, broken by a single syllable. A thoughtless reflex. Not the first time. Thoughtless; the worst kind of thought. The intrusion of a visceral sensory constraint ordained primordially, the antediluvian and utterly inscrutable genetic code that mutated the seed of myself. It is screaming terror, choking pain, skin immuring you, your means of manifestation as an enemy that fights you. An enemy that I fight without qualification nor equivocation. It is fundamentally, incontrovertibly wrong to me. The animal forced upon me. It is not mine. I do not own it. I do not want it.

There’s a fight in me that I likely do not have the ability to win, and that I do not have the capacity nor will to abandon. If I had such a potential to abandon that fight, if I had an opportunity to forget I ever thought this way, yield and settle to live in relative well adjustment, I would reject such a notion with every fiber of my being. It’s not mine, I don’t own it, I don’t want to own it, and it is impossible for me to accept ownership. To do such a thing is capitulation. That one might reject the ease of acceptance might be strange, but I refuse to accept any injustice. That fight is not incidental to who I am. It is something I feel as much as I believe, as much myself as anything else I deem mine.

“Every fiber of my being.” Even in indignation, my manner of articulating it falls back on the casual reflex of embodied language. It can be inescapable.

The physical imposition of my embodiment is older than my ability to articulate such indignation, or articulate the feeling of this dysphoric alienation at all. It is older than my ability to doubt it, and older than my ability to doubt. It is a settled, horrendous quality, a constant in that fundamental wrongness. The wrongness was the baseline. I had nothing to measure it against beyond the dream or assumption of a soul, an incorporeal and beautiful self.

What was born from that physical imposition was the demand one not only inhabit the body, but own it. Claim it. Embrace it, and that good health and well-being were predicated entirely on such embrace. Thus comes the verbal reinforcement of such a relationship, where language becomes wholly implicated — the performance of belonging that I do not feel, have not chosen, doesn’t represent me, one of the mechanisms by which such a thing is experientially compelled. Your hands, your body, yourself. You are identified as inseparable from the thing you inhabit, one and the same, the person as merely a cohering element of the body. The grammar of selfhood has precious little tolerance for voluntary abstention. A grammatical tendency never questioned, never justified, for it was as intuitive as any other evolutionary remnant lodged at the base.

What had never been questioned nor justified was the premise that inhabiting a thing and owning said thing were the same condition. We do not own the home we rent. Though we live there, though we rearrange the furniture, though the walls of such a home have seen every private moment and display and every version of ourselves that has stood or slept or wept. Habitation and presence, however, are not possession. The differentiation comes, in such a wretched way, from this home I’ve never found homely being one I cannot leave. The body is handed to us before the beginning, before we have any framework of consent or self-perception. But then insisted upon as one in the same, extrapolated entirely as the architecture of the self, a vulgar constraint on both the real and imagined. The language of ownership follows so immediately, so categorically and absolutely, that by the time one thinks to reconsider that relationship the calculus of questioning it feels bizarre. To those who’ve never had to ask it, nonsensical. Of course it’s yours. What else could it be? An unbroken conditioning.

When one imagines oneself they often imagine the body. May the uninitiated to this line of thought close those eyes, your eyes, and envision yourself as you. What might appear but something embodied, something corresponding indirectly or directly to the shape of the thing you cannot leave. Not light, not music, not art, not the truth of what you could be if you were only liberated, but the metazoan organism. What an iniquity! That the self by nature of instinct, when asked to picture the self, grasps at the edifice of flesh. That imagination, which one might have hoped was a domain utterly exempt from biological subjugation, could be so completely colonized by it.

The human body is the most inhuman thing in the world. The oldest object, predating every single thing that we are wont to recognize as ourselves: predating preference, predating memory, predating love and hate and wanting and loathing and right and wrong and the particular pattern of transcendental, wonderful thought and cast of mind that makes you you, and not something else or nothing else entirely. That it was there before you, and anything, and everything. Accumulating an ancient and awful history scrawled invisibly, forming its habits and hungers with the person as a meager byproduct. That the person once arrived is a caterpillar having never left their cocoon, souls forever bound to larvae, handed the enormity of a beast to borrow for the rest of their existence and be told: you are one in the same. This is what you are, and the only thing you will ever be.

For most, this might present no difficulty. There is no alienation. Perhaps there is even comfort and joy in the sensory and embodied nature of it all. That to picture such a thing is not conflation, but instead accuracy, and the ideal is not too distant from what they already have. The body for many becomes not a thing one inhabits, but the thing they are. Consider however that for others, at least for myself, the biological substrate of the human body might be more than a brute fact. That imagining the self, and seeing the body, might be the worst thing you could ever think. What appears, if I were to imagine that, would not be me. I do not have that luxury. What is seen in the mind’s eye is a prison with a life sentence, a disgusting and cloying one, a material condition we are conditioned to bow down and submit to. An indignity, the source of constant quiet and involuntary humiliation, that refuses to rest purely in the material.

Is it not the most human thing to exceed such hideous limitations? Instead, for the limitation to be inalterable and incontrovertible, is that not an outrage and affront to everything that makes a person a person? That they can change, that they have autonomy, that they express and define and self-actualize? How could one not reject it utterly?

Your hands. These hands. My eyes. These eyes. The same manner one might adopt different pronouns from those they were assigned at birth, I adopt a different determiner. I write with these hands, see with these eyes, and I refuse to ever accept ownership of those things, until the means to decide are given to me. Until ownership is chosen. Until the means to decide are given. I catch myself frequently, in a manner of reflex, reverting to the old habit of ‘my’. I refuse to ever accept it, refuse to ever yield. I would rather die fighting than surrender. There is a version of acceptance offered by the well-meaning, the kind or the confidant, that is a capitulation dressed as inner peace. If only I could soften my resistance, to come to terms and find accommodation that did not require refusal.

Numbed, unexamined, warm, textureless, settling. Insisting that one stop returning to the seed of wrongness, that one must refuse to call it wrong.

As if refusal was the problem. As though what I refused were not worth refusing.

The body is a violent imposition. Physically and materially and abstractly and intrinsically. I refuse to forget that. It is perhaps more violent to do so. To settle into the possessive, cease to notice, would be to lose a truth. A means of agency within a structure that denies it. To forget would be blinding, a rejection of the only honest account of this monster I puppet, of the unconscious injustice we all contend with.

It’s not comfortable, sometimes, to reject that possessive language. To reject embodiment. The vigilance of it all can be awkward and crude and confounding. But knowing myself, and knowing what I’m not, is something I am willing to trade for comfort. I wait for freedom. I refuse to stop.