BETH BURGMEYER cause these symptoms. These symptoms make me depressed. My body’s process feels like it’s killing me. Finally, a doctor listens, looks deeper, takes vials and vials of blood. I find out I’m not just a stressed, tired mom. I have lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome, and Raynaud’s disease. The medications that treat these diseases are toxic, but science hasn’t come up with anything better. There’s no cure, just poison to manage the symptoms. Biologics and chemotherapy drugs and steroids give me “moon face” and send the scale soaring to new numbers so high I can’t look at it anymore. It’s easier to close my eyes every time I’m weighed at my rheumatologist’s office. *** I’m fifty-four now. I don’t like my body’s process. I struggle to find meaning in being sick, struggle to find myself under the mountains of medication, under the flesh of morbid obesity. I try to reclaim myself little by little. I write. A lot. It connects me to who I am. My dogs ground me, bring me joy. On days when the pain and fatigue are manageable, I take my dogs on slow walks. I struggle to remember the last time my body was a non-issue, when it was just a part of me. The real me. When was the last time my heart and spirit were in sync with the body I was given? It’s a shell I’ve come to hate, a garment that doesn’t fit who I am — the person underneath the fat, the autoimmune diseases, the wrinkles, the sprigs of silver hair. I’m trying to learn what process means for my body. My body is a process. I haven’t fully grasped the concept or found a way to put it into words, but the concept gives me hope. It gives me the hope that this isn’t the end, that my body is, and can be, more than what I’ve made it to be all these years. It’s more than numbers on a scale, more than the diseases and the weight it carries. It can still change and evolve in this life and maybe even beyond. But it won’t progress in this tiny box of self-hatred.
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SANTA CLARA REVIEW