Heartbeat
Heartbeat
Anonymous Entry
I’ve always been scared by the beating of the heart. Never in my childhood was I tempted to pick up a stethoscope, toy or real, to eavesdrop on that thumping that is the indisputable proof of human life. I resisted taking my own pulse, even when instructed to do so in middle school health class, hated the throbbing of my arm compressed by a blood-pressure cuff. It is folk knowledge that children are soothed by the beating heart of their parents, the soundtrack to which the infant develops in the safety of the womb. But the heartbeat of my parents, and later my boyfriends or partners, failed to bring me comfort but instead repulsed me and caused me to shift myself away from that drumming, disconcertingly both regular and irregular. I trained my mind to focus on the person - their warmth of their embrace, the familiarity of their features - rather than this foreign, fleshy organ pulsating inside of them. Only now have I stopped to delve more deeply into this discomfort, my aversion to this most sensual and physical proof of life.
Now I think that perhaps all my life my heart was communicating to me through its beating, repeating a message I chose to ignore. It was telling me ‘you are alive but just as fragile as the parts that compose you’. I didn’t listen to this voice not because I didn’t want to listen to it, but because I was terrified to hear it jump or skip or stop altogether. I was afraid to admit the power of matter over mind, the contingency of me. As I pursued proof of life outside myself, the feeling of being alive became the rush of achievement, the burning lungs and aching limbs of a body in motion, always pushing harder and further and faster – onwards and upwards. And because I ignored the voice of my heart and its message, I didn’t notice when it grew weaker and weaker, reduced to a whisper. I ignored my heartbeat until I couldn’t anymore.
That moment came in a doctor’s office in April, a setting non-descript in its sterility and florescence. The doctor’s words percolated slowly through the filters of my consciousness; my heartrate was dangerously low, and I was suffering from ‘malnutrition.’ I was alone, sitting on the crinkly paper of the patient’s chair. In the half-hour before seeing the doctor, I had been asked by the nurses to undress and lie still as wires were attached to my chest and upper body in a pattern that seemed to me to be random, to stand on a scale which was read from a handheld device that I couldn’t see. A little machine was clipped onto my finger that showed numbers I didn’t know the meaning of, and a blood- pressure cuff was wrapped around my arm, pumped to squeeze like a boa constrictor strangling its prey. I felt the throbbing of my arm as the sleeve released, and it reminded me of my heartbeat. I wished the pulsing to stop, and it did. A nurse dressed in dark blue entered all this collected data – all these facts from which I felt so disconnected – into a chunky IBM laptop on the desk next to the patient’s chair, angled away from me, of course.
None of this, not even the echocardiogram (the name for the test with the wires, only learned later) was particularly alarming to me. I had been to the doctor’s many times over the past years for various check- ups and minor maladies; I went through the motions and did what I was told. I had always been good at that. I made small talk while my body was checked and tested, knowing that the nurses were more interested in the numbers on those screens than the content of our conversation. They did their jobs and I tried to make it easier, tried to be the perfect patient. I was confident in my ability to pass these tests; I always had before. I was an athlete, ate healthily, stayed away from drugs and alcohol (mostly). I had nothing to hide and gained an assured boost from the doctor’s approval when my vitals came back strong, my weight always on the lower end of healthy. I was an athlete throughout high school and my body reflected that. I played soccer and ran and ate until I was satisfied. The doctor’s office was somewhere where I could succeed without even trying. But this time I had not succeeded or even passed. I had failed, specifically my heart - that beating inside my chest that I always preferred not to acknowledge – had failed.
It took wires stuck to my body and the words of a stony-faced physician for me to hear and to slowly begin to understand that my heart had not failed me. My body was not now a failure, when previously it had been a success, a source of pride, a vehicle of athletic accomplishment. I was just beginning to comprehend that I was a person of flesh and blood, that the persona I enacted in my daily life – my life of school, sports, social life – was intertwined with this physical body, these organs, this heart. That day, so unexpectedly and unprecedently, my body spoke, and my mind was forced to follow. And from that day forward I began to realise the harmfulness and plain inaccuracy of this distinction, mind and matter.
Two months after that first appointment, I’m in a place where I never expected that I would be. The physical space is familiar; the lavender walls painted years ago at my sister’s choosing, the simple light-wood bed and dresser, the tall windows facing out across our front lawn and the tall trees that line it. This particular intersection of time and place, however, this moment – me at twenty-one living in the room across from my parents’, writing something decidedly non-academic, at the desk where my sister had drawn her childhood artworks – is something new entirely.
When people survive an accident that could have claimed their lives or reach a goal against the odds, there is a moment – at least in the literary recounts – of self-assessment in which this survivor, this champion, make sure that they still have all their fingers and toes, that they have not lost some vital part of themselves in the process of evading or pursuing. I have done nothing to warrant a glorious account of what preceded this moment of checking that all my limbs are still intact. I have not escaped a warzone or natural disaster, have not climbed the highest peaks or run the longest distance; yet here I am, for the first time, checking – or rather discerning – that I am a complete person, that in the past years and months of my life I have not lost, have not been deprived - or deprived myself - of anything that I need to keep breathing and moving forward.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from having an eating disorder, it’s that we are not who we say we are. We are not students or athletes or academics or artists or philosophers or economists. We are what is left when all these names are stripped away, when all titles, occupations, possessions, and means of measurement are removed. When I had to let go of all these things during treatment, when I had to give up my academics and my athletics, I experienced the terrifying feeling of being no one, having nothing that distinguished me from the other billions of human beings in this world with hearts beating in their chests and lungs that breathe. I felt empty and fragile, like the hollow shell of the person I once was.
But I went on a journey, one that required the initial soul-wrenching process of letting go the things that once defined me, and I realised that this emptiness was itself an illusion.
We are all full people. These organs that pump the blood through our veins and oxygen through our airways are real. We are not reduced to them when we lose the markers that have guided our paths of growth and development. They allow us to take in the world, to be part of something big and beautiful just by being.
As an anthropology student, I have been taught to value cultural nuance above all else, to examine each person, each event, each practice and custom as relative to its (social) context. In the yet-inconclusive debate of ‘nature vs. nurture,’ anthropologists have, with their many verbose ethnographies, certainly added much weight to the ‘nurture’ side of the scale. Especially hefty have been those concerned with the topic of agency, illustrating the individual – even the person subjected to the most confining aspects of neo-liberalism/imperialism, gendered violence and discrimination, deprivation, etc. – as an agent. Speaking entirely from my own experience, it seems much less accurate to picture people – ourselves or our ‘interlocutors’ – as birds beating our wings in smaller and smaller cages. Rather, I now see myself and those around me as sieves through which the substance of life flows. Our bodies – our hearts, our lungs, our fingers, and toes, our senses – let the world in. If we treat our skin like armour, the substance of life will flow around us rather than through us, and, like a boulder amidst a flowing river, we become stationary, slowly being eroded away by the movement of all that surrounds us. We are unable to enjoy the feeling of being swept along, unable to see beyond the next bend.