I’ve spent a great deal of my life feeling as though I fall short of an ideal. It rarely has anything to do with how events actually went, my achievements or lack of them, or anything resembling a group consensus about where I stand. If you asked a friend, “has Molly failed?” they would likely laugh in a semi-annoyed, of-course-not kind of way. And yet here I am, as I suspect many of you are too, in a daily negotiation with that ideal.
For me, its main points of attack have always been my capital-B Body. These days, it tends to show up in all the ways my body seems to articulate a kind of dis-ease when I’m with other people. I move, twitch, tie my hair up and take it down, hold it, release it, shift my legs, slouch, sit straight, stand, then sit again. I move relentlessly. With that movement comes the internal reprimand: why are you like this, why can’t you just sit still. I berate myself, and sometimes others join in too.
But when I consider what this ideal actually demands, the image I am meant to embody in the presence of others is almost always one of perfectly calm, untouched composure. Someone so still their breathing would count as excess. Someone sealed, untroubled by appetite or reaction, unaffected by proximity, need or discomfort. In other words, a dead person. There is something almost Kafka-esque about the amount of time I have spent attacking myself for the sin of being alive in the presence of another, mistaking ordinary human fallibility for failure.
And, assuming I am merely another person and not as catastrophically damaged as my superego insists, why would this be? What is gained by punishing oneself for refusing to become perfectly objectifiable, a body emptied of resistance? In Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), Freud offers a bleak insight: the price of living together is that much of our aggression and unruly vitality must be turned inward. What cannot be expressed outward returns as guilt, self-reproach and a relentless inner judge. The superego sets itself up inside us and begins the work of policing.
But this inner authority is not gentle. Its aggression does not vanish when it turns inward, it sharpens andmoralises. The ideal it holds before us is one of frictionless composure, a body without insistence, a presence without demand. The fantasy of perfection begins to look a lot like the fantasy of lifelessness. To be perfectly composed is to be free of hunger, free of disturbance, free of desire, i.e., it is to resemble an object.
Freud himself doubted that redirecting aggression inward makes the world more peaceful. We like to imagine violence belongs to other people, other countries, other eras. We call ourselves civilised and exile brutality from our self-image. Yet repression does not erase aggression. It detaches us from it. It leaves us estranged from our own intensity, all while the shadow of war encroaches on our horizon.
Seen this way, the small ways my body says “hello, I don’t quite love this” begin to look less like moral failings and more like a refusal to contort myself into an object that exists only for another’s gaze. In fact, dare I say, it might even resemble a somewhat healthy refusal, insofar as its not enacted constantly in my relationships, career, or just out of my view.
But the difficulty is, as Lacan elaborates, anxiety like this emerges when the demand of the Other presses too close. When that demand crowds in, the body answers. So, the more I punish myself for failing to become porcelain, the closer that demand seems to press. The more I try to erase signs of life, the more acutely I feel the pressure to disappear into an acceptable shape. The worse that demand gets, the more my body will speak.
The task, then, may be less about learning to like myself and more about tolerating the fact of being alive: restless, reactive, permeable, unfinished, a failure. If we think of our symptoms as speaking our discontent, we might begin, cautiously, to respect them.
My body, it turns out, is a brilliant little rebel.