had the yikes™️ realization tonight that i've let myself get so deconditioned that i got so-called runner's itch from. going for another walk (only very mildly and only in the last quarter mile but still). however this did make me wonder whether maybe doing more physical activity would improve the circulation in my extremities (dilate, little capillaries, dilate!) and be a path to having feet that were less freezing all the time… 🤔
interesting to me to contemplate how, i think, unusually decoupled my relationship with food is from my relationship with my body—
specifically, i just saw a post on my dash abt cultural anxieties around food and eating and fatness, which were pretty understandably being discussed as a single constellation (because even if the relationship between these things is more complex than we often make it out to be, society does often conceptualize them as straightforward cause and effect), and it struck me that like. i'm not entirely immune to body issues but i am pretty entirely immune to the idea that i ought to be reacting to any dissatisfaction with my meatsuit by reducing or otherwise altering my food intake in some way? which is kind of wild
and tbh i kind of think it reflects a feeling of powerlessness that probably is problematic—like, the idea that you can alter your body composition via diet in a straightforward way is, as i understand it, pretty false, but it does probably provide an illusion that there's some control to be had! whereas my feeling is like, well, my body is the size and shape it wants to be, and that's changed in the past and will probably change again in the future, but short of surgical (or i guess hormonal) intervention i have no control over that, i just live here
which i do intellectually think is more realistic, on the whole, but. also of a piece with my overall tendency to learned helplessness, probably
kinda funny that my body hair is just like every other aspect of me in being poised precisely between 'will get funny looks' by hegemonic standards and 'pfft, you think that invisible shit counts?' by counterculture ones