fromjunia

Unitarian Universalism teaches of the interdependent web. That every action revibrates widely to every other person, that no action is isolated either in cause or effect. In other words, responsibility is distributed, and there are no bystanders.

If I am caught in this web, how responsible can I be for my anorexia? I have felt that I am completely responsible. I chose to go along with it.

This teaching challenges me to reconsider that feeling. What was everyone else doing? How did society fail to protect me? How did it encourage me? How did my family contribute? What strings attached to me pulled me to Ana? I walked some of the way, but I was pulled too.

I do not feel I can care about being pulled, because I cannot control that. If responsibility is distributed then it is not mine, and if most of my life is me being pulled then my primary response is to feel and respond to those feelings. That strikes me as useless, because I become a responder and not an agent. The interdependent web is the rejection of my agency as articulated through atomistic models. But the trauma-informed—the factual—account is that my body is not a primary agent, and that it acts at a magnitude that dwarfs my ego. My ego seeks safety through agency. I’ve seen how that safety plays out.

The weird thing is that my ego-safety is not the important safety. It matters, but not as much as bodily-felt safety. And, unfortunately, I can’t independently act to secure my way to body-safety. I have to rely on others. I am vulnerable. That’s a fact that my body feels, no matter what my ego wants.

Maybe it’s self-confirming, but the interdependent web seems like another mark for pessimism. I need safety, and I cannot secure it on my own. I am vulnerable to the actions of others, no matter what I do, same as everyone else. We need things we cannot guarantee. And we’re an ego stapled to an animal body, where most the happenings occur in the body and the ego constantly struggles to find its place. The reality of being a human is bleak.

But pessimism is the truth that sets us free from the idolatry of the future, and it does so again here. There is no future where I can be invulnerable. Ana is an optimist: She says there can be a secure future through metering intake and narrowing the scope of the world to control of my body. No, that’s a lie. Ana can’t provide me safety. I am interdependent with every other soul. I am now, and always will be, vulnerable, and nothing I do can change that. I can only respond to it.