Reading Body Horror to Accept My Own
There’s a pink scar stretching from my lower lip to the bottom of my chin, where a wakeboard carved my face in two in a freak boating accident the summer I was fifteen. It’s faded now, to the point where people who meet me say they never even noticed it until I pointed it out. In the weeks following the accident, bright blue sutures crawled down my face, drawing the gaze of every person who passed me on the street.
“How many stitches did you have to get?” They would ask, to which I had no answer. I’d asked the surgeon the same thing when he was done. “Oh I have no idea. I was worried about a lot more than counting stitches.” I took his answer to mean countless.
He kept me awake for the operation, thinking I might asphyxiate given the area affected. Adrenaline and local anesthesia alone kept me numb enough to get through the initial surgery, the damp cloth over my eyes a poor substitute for unconsciousness. It wasn’t until his work was done and I hobbled to the bathroom that the reality of what I’d undergone actually started to sink in. Bloody and swollen and bruised, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. All I saw was a mangled collection of flesh and bone barely held together by string. “I look like Frankenstein’s monster,” I said to the scrub nurse.
“Give it time.” she said, promising the swelling would go down over the following days and weeks.
And it did, to the extent possible. When I got back to school that September, I relished the gory retelling of my accident. The speed with which the wakeboard ripped through me, tearing flesh from bone. My face, off my face. The adrenaline rush was so powerful, I’d explain, that I heard screams echoing across the lake before I realized they were coming from me, the water around me turning a deep crimson as I resurfaced.
That year in English we read The Metamorphosis. I could relate to Gregor Samsa, waking up one morning in the body of a cockroach, unrecognizable even to himself. Ungeheures ungeziefer is the term Kafka actually uses in the original German to describe Samsa’s new form: a monstrous vermin. I understood what his transformation must’ve felt like, remembering my shock at first glimpsing the monster looking back at me in the bathroom mirror. I’d shuddered at the reflection, still in denial that it was my very own face looking back – all black and blue and swollen. Now I’m someone else, I thought, and it was anyone’s guess as to how the world might respond.
In the twelve years since that accident, I’ve had a string of surgeries to correct what went wrong in 2011. The work I’d initially had done has since gone wrong on many occasions, always at inconvenient times and places: by Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, on I-94 in Detroit, where I found a Russian-speaking surgeon to reluctantly help me through a language barrier. The anxiety that my face could need fixing anytime, anywhere, was constant, and very real.
It was disappointing but not surprising then, to learn earlier this winter, that I’d need yet another surgery. Right away, I started spiraling, imagining another surgery I’d stay awake for, sutures driving through flesh as I tried in vain to hold back the hot tears already rolling down the sides of my face. Even worse, this one would require six months on a liquid and soft food diet. I’d given up drinking less than a year ago, and this would mean giving up a vast majority of food as well. I’d be living a completely ascetic lifestyle, it seemed, assuming I was able to comply with the demands of this new regimen.
My mind raced to the worst case scenario. The anxiety around the operation and the reality of my life afterwards would be too great to bear while sober. I would slip easily into a painkiller addiction, spurred on by a post-op prescription. Unable to eat most foods, I would undoubtedly plunge into a full blown eating disorder. Pills and starvation. Both distractions would usher in a blissful numbness, I imagined. Biochemical permission to leave the grotesque reality of having a body, no longer bothering me with its demands for food and drink and other physical needs. On top of everything else, it was suggested I go cold turkey off caffeine to ease this anxiety, eliminating even my least cunning vice. Goodbye, Diet Coke, my trusty steed.
What could I do? How could I be in the world? Can’t eat. Can’t drink. Can hardly meet up with someone for coffee. My instinct was to go into hiding for the next six months. Hibernating away from the world as I healed seemed like the most appealing option, re-emerging only when my transformation was complete and I recognized myself once again.
While I wallowed in my own self-pity, I devoured body horror: Otessa Moshfegh. Mona Awad. Rachel Yoder. I read about women like me. Women whose bodies had set them on a narrative arc they never asked for. In pain, drugged out, undergoing corporeal transformations even they couldn’t fully comprehend. Bored housewives waking up as dogs like the traveling salesmen waking up as vermin before them. Characters like me, who fantasized about being a floating consciousness unburdened by the demands and failures of the body.
Be nice to yourself, I was reminded.
Speak gently.
But the voices in my head were vicious and ungenerous. The only thing that softened my inner monologue was imagining myself talking to these other women instead. After all, I would never say things so cruel to them in the depths of their pain, would I?
I wished the drugs that Otessa had invented were real. Valdignore and Prognosticrone and Maxiphenphen and Silencior. Or best of all, Infermiterol: “for when you don’t want to get up until it’s over.” I didn’t. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, forty of those pills put her to sleep for four entire months. “I felt myself float up and away,” she explains, “higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.” How lovely to be a portrait. How peaceful, to levitate above all this, leaving the earth, if just for a little while my body repaired itself and I enjoyed a deep, pharmaceutical sleep. “Sleep felt productive,” Otessa writes. “Something was getting sorted out….when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.” Those drugs didn’t actually exist though, I reminded myself. Besides, even if they did, I couldn’t take them and still stay sober.
Otessa’s narrator succeeds in forgetting what so many of us are trying to forget. At least what I was trying to forget. That I’m an animal. That my needs, despite how I may feel otherwise, are so basic. Food. Water. Shelter. What better way to fast forward this painful time than to slip into the year-long narcotic slumber that Otessa describes. Stay tucked away from the world, under my duvet, on a cocktail of meds concocted precisely for psychic rest. Oblivion. What a perfect denial of the human animal, my own human body. No longer driven by the need to eat, to drink, to wake up and fall asleep with the rise and fall of the sun.
Similarly to Otessa Moshfegh’s funny, dark, so-called “unlikeable female protagonist” Mona Awad’s Miranda in All’s Well has a similar pill habit. Painkillers are the only thing standing between her and the torturous red webs that light up her body in unyielding, excruciating pain. I imagined myself Miranda. Rushing out the door from her teaching job on campus to physical therapy, to the bar, then home again. A northern college town in the dead of winter, not unlike the place where I myself live. Time blurs, the pain deepens. She pulls her covers higher over her head and I retreat further into my cocoon, comfortable hibernating in bed with a paperback.
It’s not until Miranda strikes a Faustian bargain with three magical benefactors who lift her pain and heave it onto her nemesis instead that she gets some respite from constantly trying to escape her own body. She’s finally able to remember what it means to be an animal in a universe of animals. Warmer days ahead. “Budding branches. Pale green leaves. Spring. Spring, does she see that? A time when everything is in bloom. Everything is having sex. Everything is so damp and fragrant and fuckable.” Consciousness is sensual, and Miranda’s words make me miss the real world.
The last book I read was Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. A languishing stay-at-home mom, exhausted by early motherhood and alienated by the rigid expectations that come with it. She desperately misses the excitement of her past life as an artist and curator. “Was it her fault that she found playing trains really, really boring?” No. “That she longed for even the smallest bit of mental stimulation, for a return to her piles of books, to her long-abandoned closet of half-formed projects, to one entire afternoon of solitude and silence?” Much like All’s Well’s Miranda, Nightbitch also undergoes an inexplicable transformation, jolting her out of her own sense of detachment.
Nightbitch begins noticing the patches of dark fur sprouting up in places they weren’t before. The nub of a tail pushing up against the base of her spine. Her newfound impulse to rip through neighborhoods at night, sprinting across well-manicured suburban lawns, snapping rabbit necks along the way. There’s no more denying it. She’s transforming into a wild dog. This. “This must be what it means to be an animal... Here is my skin. Here yours. Beneath the moon, we pile inside the warm cave, becoming one creature to save our warmth. We breathe together and dream together. This is how it has always been and how it will continue to be. We keep each other alive through an unbroken lineage of togetherness.”
This, these writers teach me, this is what it means to be an animal. It’s not pills and darkened bedrooms and hiding away. It’s not using liquor, or TV, or the infinite scroll to slip away. It’s not hiding from public view while my cells slowly knit themselves together, where once they were ripped apart. It’s knowing that flesh, like cloth, can tear, and one day I might be pulled limb from limb. I break, and bleed, and somehow, my human body can work its own magic to heal itself, gradually closing the rough edges of a shaggy wound, one day at a time. I’m an animal among animals, not separate from the rest of the universe, but a small part of it. I’m a body. I’m more than a body. I’m a spiritual being temporarily gifted with a physical human shell, in all its indignity and delight.
About Emma Burger
Emma Burger is a writer, healthcare professional, and end-of-life doula living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her debut novel is titled Spaghetti for Starving Girls. You can find her work in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Across the Margin, Memoirist, and Bruiser Magazine, among other places, or at emmaburgerwrites.com.
