enduring tenderness
postcard of a body, faltering
It is International Women’s Day, and to celebrate, I bring M to watch Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an Estonian documentary that reimagines the smoke sauna as a safe space for women to share their testimonies, secrets and the shame they carry in their bodies. Women bathing together in a communal space is an image I have seen in so many bodies of work before, but this one might stand as my current favourite. The camera is always zoomed in, always close, but remains so earnest in its treatment of the naked female body. The body of a woman undulates, is a topographical map (the way a body documents age), is sacred, hardy (where it is something that can be industriously scrubbed down), fleshly (in its every movement) and earthly (at ease with the natural world) all at once. There is nothing that can be objectified here, because the film overlays it with the voices and stories of these women themselves — they laugh, heave in sorrow and chant their way through their experiences of being a woman. Tenderness, in this film, exists in the emotional intimacy they share, but also as a visceral sensation, where old wounds smart when resurfaced, and pain lingers. In the darkness, where the hot, steaming rocks echo and the deep underbelly of water gushes, we are invited to listen & take up space on the sauna bench too — I feel my own shame dislodge itself from deep within. They end off the final smoke sauna session with a ritualistic chanting that reverberates: “We sweat out all this pain, we sweat out all that fear”. They enter the lake and float with all their limbs outstretched. Out of all the things I took away from the film, I am most moved by the resilience of our bodies, and the ways that it has come to stand for the grit, courage and fortitude it takes to survive.
And my own body is a faltering one. In December, I’d spent the festive week of Christmas & New Year’s in bed, with a stubborn cough stuck deep in my throat. At the same time, I’d found out my liver ran red in the first health screening I’ve ever gotten, and I’d had to get endless vials of blood extracted from my right arm (my left arm insisted on being impenetrable). Suddenly, I found myself staring at ornate, porcelain horses in the doctor’s waiting room, wondering if it mocked my malleability, or if it was meant to symbolise the robustness of the body. We spoke of my liver like it was an external thing to tread carefully around or a concept to be grasped, when really, my jeans were pressing into it the whole time the conversation was being had. I spent most of December frustrated with my own body & its failings, until I decided to take back some kind of ownership — I got my first tattoo in the last hours of 2024. It surprised me, the first time I put it under water, to find out that it was more wound-like than i’d ever imagined it to be. In a way, it made sense. I had chosen the word, love, after all, and it took so much enduring to get here — 24 years and a 3-hour session of pricking. The funny thing is, I would have to endure more irregularities — my sensitive skin developed an angry rash to the second skin on my tattoo, and a mysterious bout of eczema battered my lips. For a week I felt the need to hide, but in a way, it felt like a necessary purging. The first week of January was reserved solely for healing.
Lately, I am thinking about what it means to 1) hold tenderness and 2) be a body that is turning 25 soon. There are some things I am nursing — a sudden, inexplicable dip in self-worth, my lifelong mother wound, the singular grief of ending friendships that were on the decline, and this general sense of restlessness I can’t quite shake or put to words. I worry often about the ways my life has grown coarser, and the prose of my thoughts too — externalisations are frequent, the work I do for five days a week is in service of capitalism, and it seems I have chained my mind to routines and cycles. My body is in a state of perpetual disgruntledness — I feel the repulsive trickle of sweat run down my chest on the too-stuffy train to work; I cannot seem to settle into sleep, and my time for that is dwindling by the hour; the stale office air seems to seep first into my face, then my person. In all of the discomfort, I am worried about the stiffness that seems to have seized my person and my capacities. I worry that it is irrevocable.
D & I met up recently, and we realise we’ve hit ten years of being friends. We both remark that we might have lost some of the brazenness of our youth — when we’d met, we’d typed almost exclusively in all-caps and shared big dreams of what a life abroad would look like. She thinks it isn’t so bad that we’ve shed some of that, because it means we can now see the real things. She goes on to show me the Sylvanian Families set that she’s been eyeing, and on the train home I realise that this is something our 15-year-old selves would have shunned for desires that seemed cooler, or more womanly; our 25-year-old selves love it because we have finally learnt how to be gentle and at ease with ourselves.
There are old wounds that have been healing well all along. On an unsuspecting Monday, for instance, I’d walked straight out of the office and right into an encounter with someone I’d once loved, in a scenario that I’d once conceived of as the worst possible. I blanked at first, unsure of the uncanny, but in so many ways it felt right — the certainty of my once-impossible, new life carried me through. Where there was once so much pain, there is now only peace; my body has weathered both lifetimes. By the powers of synchronicity, the place where it happened is called ‘New Station’, right at the heart of ‘Fortune Centre’. I’ve loved and lost, and here I still am, eating dessert with my lover.
There are ways that I am now standing up for myself that i could never have conceived of, like recognising where it hurts, and knowing when to treat it (instead of a relentless sort of persevering). I no longer rush to please (or i’m trying really hard not to); I get rid of too-tight pants; I step away from things that have given me enough distress, even if the cleaving hurts. Some old pains still plague me (who am I to make these decisions/what if I was meant to endure this bit/all loss is terrible), but I think I am learning to do things even when I feel afraid. I am still very much an anxious person, but I am contending with the scarier thing — of just letting it be. Relinquish total control. In a way, that is a kindness. It is how i am trying to be tender with my twenty-somethings. I sit with tender gums, in hopes of growing new teeth that will give me new appetites. The softness of my tongue feels like a promise.
*I’m sorry I haven’t been writing — sometimes sitting around with your fears for too long simply enlarges them. D asked me to write, so here I am, afraid and still writing.
Here are some of my new appetites:
i LOVE your prose, it feels like a breathing body. a tender piece of your heart that i get to hold. kisses always, you live in my thoughts and i long to read your words.