I flu, therefore I am not

I hate being unwell. It might be my meglomanic conviction that the world will fall apart without me, or internalised childhood guilt about days off, but mostly I think it is the sheer misery of being overwhelming conscious of embodiment.

Now, with my academic hat on, I'd argue for the importance of embodiment: that the mind/body split impoverishes both these aspects of existence, that body and mind inform one another, that to ignore or supress the body has an intensely dubious history of power, priviledge and exploitation. Lying on the couch on Tuesday, focusing on breathing with Dr Phil on TV because that was as much as I could engage with intellectually, all I wanted was transcendence of the body.

A few days later and feeling better, I'm more aware of the taken-for-grantedness of my healthy body - that getting up in the morning with energy to do things isn't always the case. I'm also aware of the irony of one of my first reactions to feeling better, which was planning how to discipline my body to work harder, more efficiently and more healthily. Being told that you need to take better care of yourself (thanks mum) as yet another set of chores to add to a long list still feels, at the moment, like weight on the transcendence side of the argument.