Read this when you want to break up with your body.

So like every day because oof, we are just NOT COMPATIBLE.

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It’s Imperfect Working Order, where we live luscious lives even whilst clamped firmly to the toilet! Or at least I do, while you cringe? IDK, new here. Just like you—thanks!)

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For a long time, I resented my body and its buffet of maladies. I called it “low budget.” It felt like a shitty old Honda Civic, missing a muffler and sporting multi-color door panels. Touch a door handle, and it’d come off in your hand. Speedometer? What speedometer?

19 years ago, before both this body and this trooper of a foreign car would both get totaled but keep trucking anyway.

But you know what shitty old Honda Civics are? TENACIOUS.

You can drive those suckers to 312,543 miles. On bumpy backroads. They’ll wartime-ration cheap gas to eke out 450 miles to a tank. When you need groceries, they’ll go-get’er. If you gotta get to the hospital fast, that quick shifter comes in handier than the missing seatbelts ever would. And you can parallel park a Civic just about anywhere (while passive-aggressively driving down property values!)

Can you count on the heater, the mirrors, the locks, the seatbelts, both headlights, literally anything that isn’t point A to point B?
Uhhhh, no.

Is point B necessarily plan A?
Double no.

But do they smell good?
Ahahahaha, no.

Road closed. Whatever. Pre-illness, dragging my good sport of a Dad all over the desert southwest in this good sport of a not-off-road vehicle.

Still: with God as its witness, that crustbucket Civic will get you there. (Or like, somewhere. Can’t be super picky.)

You’ll be reeking, rattled, and covered in dog hair from two owners ago. But THERE.

And, it’ll get you there memorably. Everybody’s had a shitwhip like this. When you stuffed seven hormone-addled high school buds in after school, giggling in search of trouble. When as a bone-tired Mom, you belted along to screeching radio speakers, your carseated audience loving every minute. When you sighed a shaky exhale merging onto the interstate, back bumper riding low with everything you owned.

That’s this body: a discount, hand-me-down, rusting, roaring, burp-scented Honda Civic. This week, my thyroid was the proverbial flying hubcap. My body has been passed down through generations (of trauma and genetic diseases.) It feels cheap, lightweight, and fragile. It doesn’t seem like it could get me anywhere at all.

But it damn well can.

Reeking, rattling, and excuse me where is all this dog hair even from? it’s still carrying me through the best memories of my life, the only ones I’ll get. It gets me there, wherever there winds up being. It’s painful—Civics aren’t known for comfy seats or functioning heaters or good suspension. And it’s fun, somehow.

No one really knows how a Honda Civic keeps going, even when they’re missing parts and wailing belts. They’re messy magic that way. Same for this soul vehicle. I’ve gone from glaring at my unforgivable meatsack to admiring it for being much smarter than I am.

Family Christmas gave me a break from cooking and computering, granting me the agency to make it out to this winter wonderland—a half hour from town, a minute or two from the van, and a euphoria hard to explain after weeks of struggling with grocery store trips.

Bodies, even sick ones, constantly nano-adjust to just about anything to keep you chugging.*

Someday we’ll look back and see, our bodies hid unknown viruses in our tissues to protect us from them. Our bodies lowered our vitamin D to try to modulate our immune systems. Our bodies saw a threat that we didn’t register, and rallied an all-out counterattack with a comprehensive strategy. Yes, we suffered in this, but we SURVIVED, which was our bodies’ ultimate task. They hurt us, but only to save us from a worse fate. Someday, we’ll know why.

Right now, we don’t—but I suspect my body is actually working overtime, all the time, given the circumstances, just like the hardest-hustling little Honda in the fleet. Whatever “it” is, my body is battling it hard. It’s not just “doing it’s best” (said simperingly), but mounting a highly coordinated counter-attack meant to keep me as well as possible—despite how unwell I feel. It’s “best” is a marvel I cannot fully realize or understand. It’s protecting me with its all, too furious to worry about fumes and sputtering. It’s getting me there.

Turns out, my body isn’t a lemon.
It’s a goddamn Honda Civic, and it’s the ride of my life.

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*(If you like sciencey-stuff, you’ll love this piece about how the gut might intentionally slash normally-beneficial butyrate producing microbes in inflamed guts to protect stem cells.)

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