Body scan

Legs: Last time I wrote about how I eat. This time I’m writing about how I walk.

While I love walking, I often feel as if I do it incorrectly, as if the way I move from one place to another isn’t just clocky (a persistent concern) but ineffective, as if the thing that’s preventing me from moving naturally is also preventing me from moving at all (which of course isn’t true, or else how would I be getting anywhere?), and as if what’s natural must necessarily be optimal, and also as if there’s an essential walking style that I failed to learn at some point in my development, which doomed me to totter between two stiff, Bellmer-like limbs that I don’t have control over and which I wouldn’t know how to operate even if I did1.

And yet I do have some control over how I walk because of course I change it, as we all do, depending on where I am and who’s around, consciously and even unconsciously altering my shape and stride (length, cadence, weight distribution, and point of contact with the ground) from how it is when I’m home alone (putatively the most “natural” version of how I walk, though who can be sure) to something more suited to working in an office, cruising at a party, passing a group of men on the street, entering the women’s bathroom at Barclay’s with Jade (who looks like a woman), entering the men’s bathroom at the airport with Nes (who looks like a man), pressing through the dance floor toward the DJ, dashing through the train station, or finding a seat in my gynecologist’s waiting room. When I want or need to look less gay (which is sort of like passing as a man, but not quite), I square my hips and shift my ballast upward into my shoulders, although this intervention—like deepening my voice or dethroning my gestures—is a lot harder to maintain than you’d think. Sometimes the whole thing backfires, making me even clockier, and so What’s the point? I think, as I do when someone sees me at the beach in Speedo briefs and calls me Ma’am anyway, although fears of this minor kind of humiliation fly out the window when I’m not in New York City, a place where I mostly feel free to do what comes “naturally,” which is to mince in a way that my butch boyfriend loves to parody (which I find amusing and even validating, perhaps because it reinforces something that doesn’t always feel quite real to either of us and perhaps my dad used to do it, too, though without Nes’ good-natured self-awareness), because once you’ve been chased, or bashed, or asked to leave an establishment because you looked wrong—and a good 25-95% of looking wrong is moving wrong, I’ve learned—you’ll take your chances trying to pass, at least sometimes, maybe. I mean, I guess it just really depends, doesn’t it?

But of course, as I said, doing what comes naturally doesn’t feel natural when I’m in public, and the feeling just gets worse when I try to correct myself based on a series of hunches, experiences, and biases that have led me to the dimly-held conclusion that “correct,” in this context, the context of walking, means “not comfortable,” and so there I am heading down Driggs to the Bedford L or whatever trying to enforce symmetry between the left and right sides of my body2 while contradicting the instinctual movements of my arms, shoulders, and wrists before, during, and after I take each step, a process which entails the dicing of every moment of locomotion into stills that I continue to study long after they’ve become irrelevant, although whether this means from foot to foot or block to block depends on who’s watching and of course who’s watching includes me, because this whole time I’ve been observing myself in order to achieve my “natural” style of walking, that is, the way that looks the most normal, feels the most effortless, and gets me to Point B with a minimum of resistance, but since this style cannot ever really be known (that is, qualified, reproduced, and tested in any kind of systematic way), I’m shit out of luck here.

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1

Just discovered a paper on “late medieval apotropaic devices against the spread of the plague” that depict vulvas on stilts! VULVAS ON STILTS. I, too, would feel safer from the evil eye with one of these bad boys in my cloak.

2

Or the feminine and masculine sides of my body, from the traditional Chinese perspective.