On reaching an extraordinary sense of radical acceptance of my body, and it's all down to the way I sweat
Few things made me feel ashamed like the way I sweat, but recently, something's changed and it feels so good
Mid June, and the days on the east coast of America are getting very, very hot. Washington is a swamp, we know that, but I didn’t quite realise that description was literal, not just a word to describe the murky colour of the political pond here.
When I step outside my house, the heat clasps me, all over, and wont let me go. I walk to the library and I feel a trickle of moisture inside my t-shirt. My palms sweat so much when I am outside and trying to really get something done - walk a child to a karate lesson, hurry to the library to work in a pocket of time I’ve stolen from the children, load the back of a car with shopping, catch Pablo when he’s running after a squirrel in the park - that my touch screen phone stops working. My flip-flops slip off because my feet sweat too. My hair frizzes and is damp; Evangeline tells me to put oil in it and it will be just like hers, but she is eleven years old and has the hair of a young mermaid. Mine, more like seaweed, and no oil will make it glisten like her young spun gold. I sweat and I sweat.
Sweat is the thing I dreaded as a younger woman. At school on a summer’s day, the darker marks under my arm, staining the bright yellow of my regulation uniform, were a mark of shame. In the summer holidays, I wanted to be like other girls, who could wear t-shirts the colour of Juicy Fruits over their cut off denim shorts, but those colours, I quickly learned, look a lot less appealing with a ring of damp under the arms. When I was about 13, I sewed special patches, bought in an old fashioned department store, inside the underarm of a lime green bodystocking (it was 1989). They were supposed to absorb sweat, but I just sweated right through them.
The way I sweated used to horrify me; sweat made me hate my young body. And my sweat brought with it shame. I’m surprised to find myself typing this, because as a writer I’m proud of the fact that shame isn’t something I often wrestle with. My writing is known for its emotional honesty; “raw” is a word often used to describe it, which I sometimes find amusing. I know what a reviewer means when they use the word “raw”, but to me it also suggests uncooked. In fact, to write in a way that’s “raw” and yet also readable, compelling, artistic, takes a massive amount of slow cooking. No one wants to read the raw rants of an unedited diary, do they?
But I am splitting hairs here, since I know that raw in this context is a compliment, meaning I articulate things in my books that many people keep hidden in a private place inside. And that place, deep inside, is often a place of shame. I give words to the things others feel deeply ashamed of, and I can do that because I don’t feel shame about who I am, what I desire, how I feel, my angers, lusts, feelings, since I know these things are almost certainly exactly the same things you feel, you desire, you want, you don’t want.
When I write, I constantly try to feel and then communicate some of the most complex, ostensibly shameful, emotions of life: lust, maternal ambivalence, trauma, addiction. Even grief. There’s a weird kind of shame around grief. People desert you when you are grieving, and grief rearranges everything, even old friendships. Perhaps especially old friendships. When I teach memoir and life writing, I particularly enjoy helping people access a place of deeper acceptance within themselves of what they have done and things they have had done to them; I feel no shame about communicating this stuff on the page and I love teaching other people how to feel a bit more free from their shame through their writing.
Sweat though? My sweating body made me ashamed alright. As a younger woman, I wanted a different body. Long legs, a small bum, straight hair. God, I really, really wanted straight hair. But none of these things made me feel the rich sense of shame as my sweat made me feel. I tried to hide my sweat. Tried to keep it in that private place inside. Sweat doesn’t behave like that, though. It turns up, on palms, on fabrics, on an upper lip.
Recently, though, something changed.