Today, I walked into my new climbing gym here in Colorado and I was seen. I mean my bodily presence was registered immediately and throughout the whole hour that I was there bouldering.
It wasn’t just the “new face in town” type of thing. There probably was some of that, but it was also — mostly, I’d say — something else. Something I’ve become more aware or conscious of only in the past few years: the fact that we human beings really are animals and in many ways relate to each other at a basic, instinctual level that we observe all the time in other animals (that don’t spend all their time thinking).
I grew up in a city; our dog had to be put down when I was six years old and I only had a pet turtle at home. I got some familiarity with cats, dogs, and tortoises through friends’ pets, and I didn’t fear animals; on the contrary, I went through a long phase in elementary & middle school where I’d collect and try to save or observe animals and wanted to become a zoologist when I grew up. But from adults around me as well as books I absorbed an attitude of detachment from other animals — indeed, I though of them as animals and us as human beings, as if human beings almost weren’t animals. I’ve always had the tendency to get into my head, to think a lot, to be quite rational; so that also led me to feeling remote from other animals. And I’ve had gender as well as body-image issues most of my life, so being in my head, rather than in my body probably also felt safer and/or more comfortable to me — the only way that felt safe or comfortable for me to be in my body was by being an athlete.
I started to be in my body more when I moved to California six years ago. Looking back now, I realize it has been a gradual process that really became obviously apparent to me during the pandemic (and even painfully apparent for a while then). Now I also realize that this has been part of my fundamental liberation process that started when I moved to California from Europe six years ago: leaving behind me, at a great distance, my family of origin and my ex-partner who all negated and tried to thwart/stifle my gender identity was definitely a fantastic and very powerful way to start living in my body more. And this in turn allowed me to see human beings as they really are: animals, specifically mammals.
There’s this funny memory from one of my birthday parties: there were two male friends of mine, with both of whom there was some level of physical attraction (between each of them and myself), and I remember how they looked at each other, their stance and the way they moved or held their bodies — their movements were exactly like those of two male specimens of deer or lion, or similar wild animals.
There have also been some painful instances that I remember very clearly. At the beginning, in the first place where I lived in California for over a year, I remember having the distinct feeling more than once of not being seen, i.e. as my bodily presence not being registered: I felt like I was invisible because no one really struck up conversations with me in cafes or on the street, nobody gave me the feeling of noticing I was there or of having any curiosity to get to know me. Then last spring, almost a year into the pandemic, I remember how eager I felt to be physically seen: so eager that I told a friend, “I want people to see my body” — so we went to a nude beach together! I know that feeling then was due to the long isolation and the lack of going to places like gyms where I used to go very often pre-pandemic, where people do indeed relate to each other on a physical or bodily level first of all: where we’re bodies, animals, with hormones flying around, before anything else.
Before the pandemic I had never realized what an important factor that is to my general well-being.
So now I have become particularly sensitive to the feeling of being in my body and of relating to the world, and other persons, around me through my body: with me as well as them registering each other’s bodily presence before anything else, like wild animals.
It’s not an objectification of others (or of myself), at all. It’s rather a real, specific way of interacting with the world and with other animals of which I wasn’t fully aware until recently. And I like it. I like it very much (in the appropriate contexts). But I also realize that I like it now because I’m ready for it now: because I’m finally confident and comfortable in my body and also more clear and confident about my gender identity.
So when I walked into the gym today and realized how my bodily presence was being registered, it felt really good: somehow I felt acknowledged at a very fundamental level — basic, instinctive, unfiltered. As one of the species (in this case, rock climber) — literally, as “somebody”. Oh, yeah!
The Little Prince and the Fox 