the body electric
or how chronic illness changed my relationship to my body
I have always been guarded when talking about my body, but I thought that inclination had lessened after my diagnosis with trigeminal neuralgia (TN) in 2017. Through the prism of chronic illness, I accessed what felt like my more vulnerable and truthful voice, and I became unapologetic about the resulting heart-on-my-sleeve earnestness.
But time marches on, and with that, a continued evolution in body perception. Over the years, I have weathered changes and adapted to them. These changes have me embracing a slower pace and working with a lower energetic threshold. That has become so intrinsic to my life that I don't think much about it—unless I feel self-conscious and the need to apologize for it.
Alongside the changes affected by chronic illness, there's also the natural evolution of entering early middle-age, what with hormonal fluctuations and the adaptations required to understand what feels like a new body (or one possessed by an alien).
None of this exists in a vacuum. It would be nice, helpful even, if these changes could happen one at a time, if they had to happen at all. But that's not in the realm of human possibility.
Change is the only constant and all that jazz.
There's a curious interplay between the changes I've observed in my body, understanding what it needs, and my underlying body dysmorphia. Observations can be held away at arm's length, which is a relief for someone like me who struggles to identify her more challenging emotions. A lot of the time, my intellect, my clinical eye, takes over until I’m ready to look deeper. Needs require more emotional labor, but there's a way here, too, to be clinical, to not be overcome by the complications of having needs.
But when it comes to body image, there's no way for me to distance myself from that, no way to be more objective. And that's because my relationship with my body has always felt fraught.
I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, in a predominantly white, wealthy neighborhood. Now, it’s a veritable United Nations, but that wasn’t the case back then: there were very few, if any, people who looked like me. For most of my schooling, it felt like I was surrounded almost exclusively by girls who resembled younger versions of what I saw on popular magazine covers: tall women, leggy women, straight- and light-haired women, hairless, and the list goes on. This was in stark contrast to my humble height, my curves, my blemished skin, my big, wavy hair.
It wasn't until my early thirties that I started to probe how growing up and socializing in an adolescent environment like that influenced the way I saw myself.
And it surely did—affect the way I saw myself, that is.
I developed private and very unreasonable standards for my own body and beauty. There’s no kind way to put this, so I’ll just say it: I felt fat and ugly—and no amount of parental praise and compliments could convince me otherwise. I learned to become hyper-critical of nearly every aspect of my physical appearance. The only thing that was safe was my skin color: I loved my brown skin.
But the rest of me was fair game.
It got to the point of maladaption: I learned to negate myself from the neck down, almost as if my body was a specter and only my head was visible to the world—and myself. I continued on like this for years and years, and to be honest, I still do fall back on this (though, perhaps, with lesser frequency).
What changed wasn't that I miraculously started embracing body positivity and confidence.
What changed was I was diagnosed with TN.
Suddenly, I saw my body differently, learning to appreciate its underlying machinery and intelligence, its force and vigor.
About a year into my diagnosis, I remember sitting on the overstuffed couch in my therapist's office and after lamenting my physical pain, she reminded me that my body is always working for me, always fighting for me, without thanks or praise. It keeps doing its best for me.
And there's something about hearing that reminder in that particular moment that planted the seed of confronting my dysmorphia with greater compassion.
For too long, and without realizing it, I fell prey to the trap that most people of any gender—most especially women and trans folks—experience: I saw my body as an object of consumption, as something for others to judge however they see fit. As something meant for comparison. There are numerous reasons beyond the ones I have already mentioned here for this, but it never occurred to me how much this body is my own.
My own.
When I was diagnosed with TN, this came into sharp relief. I needed to show my body—not its look, but its feel—more kindness and grace than ever before. That is a continued work-in-progress to this day, but I have made the commitment that I'll do the best I can for my body every day.
Assuming an attitude like this has taught me a lot about self-advocacy and it has given me a way to "see" my body that has nothing to do with its flaws, and inevitable transformations and aging. If I'm more attuned to how I can manage the pain I experience, what difference does it make that I have lumps and bumps, that I'm not air-brushed smooth like the digitally retouched ladies on magazine covers?
I’ve earned every flaw, every scar, every hard-won victory.
My body is electric. Alive.
I can write sentences like the ones here with the utmost confidence now, but my journey isn't over. As long as I have this body, as long as I experience it, I also carry its histories. I still carry the parts of me that can't help but negate my looks, that can't help being hyper-critical, that can't help even being disgusted.
But I refuse to let that noise be the dominant narrative.
It has taken chronic illness for me to understand that.
Talking about my body will always leave me self-conscious. It will likely always be a loaded topic—maybe not because I'll always be deprecatory, but because there's so much to be said. There's no one single descriptor that neatly ties up how I feel about this body in a nice, neat bow. There's only the murk of nuance and grey areas, and the swinging pendulum of an emotional spectrum, the reach of felt experiences.
Despite everything, I know this much to be true: I love my body.
I love this body.
I believe it's the only body I will ever have, the only body that will allow me to have a human experience.
This body of mine has shown me that what matters above all is how I experience this life, not how I look in every frame of it.
I hate that it took chronic illness to see that.
But that's my truth.
on my nightstand
Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon.
🎧 Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower.
three word book reviews
Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye: sweeping, vintage, ambitious.
🎧 Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory: meta, pretentious, insufferable.
some good things
The 2025 National Book Awards nominees were announced this week! So many interesting choices, particularly in the Fiction, Young People’s Literature, and Nonfiction categories.
This is an oldie but a goodie: in 2014, Kent Haruf penned an essay in Granta on “the making of a writer.”
I enjoyed reading this conversation between writers Elif Shafak and Lea Ypi on demagoguery, censorship, and historical trauma.
The title of this piece caught my eye and then I couldn’t stop reading: “Illness Is a Tear in the Great Cosmic Pattern.”
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As always, wishing you peace and good this coming week. See you next Sunday!