“Annie, you don’t have that kind of time.” That was a friend’s response to writer, Anne Lamott, when she inquired if her dress made her look big in the thighs. The pair were shopping for an outfit for Lamott to wear to a Lucinda Williams concert. She was, at the time, dating a fashionable man, and the writer, who normally “dressed like John Goodman”, wanted to impress him. Her friend, at the age of 36, was facing a terminal diagnosis. She had an 18-month-old child at home.
Lamott tells this story in an interview on the Financial Times Life and Art podcast. “I hear that ringing through the chambers of my soul,” she says, “we don’t have that kind of time for stupid stuff like what your butt looks like.”
Perhaps to some degree, we all know this. We know that we must be conscious to spend our finite time on this planet wisely and with care. And for the most part, we do that. But this doesn’t mean we can always help ourselves. Knowing and actioning are separate behaviours. We become distracted. We forget. And then death visits. Grief arrives and it does not say, “your bum looks perfect in that dress”, rather it insists, “it looks how it looks. Get on with it”.
And so we just encountered that time of year again, designed to waver this belief. During the “silly” Christmas season, ads target us with abundant ways to consume. Have it all. Give it all. You need it all. And so do your loved ones, the advertisers tell us. And then, with the chime of bells ringing in the new year, guilt comes gushing in.
Cameron Diaz: ‘I left movies because I wanted to live my life differently. We started our family, and that was all I wanted to do’
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin: ‘I mourned friendships for too long that were actually past their time’
‘The phone would ring and it would be Mike Scott from the Waterboys or Bono from U2. Everyone wanted to talk to my father’
Hera restaurant review: A new gastropub on Dublin’s north side, without the usual cliches
We are berated for having consumed too much. You greedy, spiritually obese slobs.
Interestingly, we will find that the cure to this deadly sin, however, is not to stop consuming but to deprive ourselves by consuming something different. Generally something that wreaks havoc with your bowels. Guilt, advertisers love it. Especially if their customers are female.
But we don’t have that kind of time.
If this is what death teaches us, illness adds, “and we don’t have that kind of choice”.
In a feature in this newspaper, where some notable folk share life lessons for their 10-years-younger selves, actor, Siobhán McSweeney talks of how nearly losing her leg, and the subsequent pain, made her fall in love with her body.
“Who knew that could happen? Thirty-five years of indifference verging on low-key hostility will change. You are going to stop looking at your body as a flesh cage that carries your brain around the place. Instead, you are going to gaze in wonder and adoration as it heals from surgery, as it relearns how to walk and cycle and dance.”
It would be reductive to claim that illness or injury irrevocably teaches us to love our bodies. Indeed, often it pits the body in an antagonising role where it feels as though designed to hurt us.
What illness does do, however, is force you to confront your body and the relationship you hold to it. Illness demands us to reckon with the fact that we are not a “flesh cage that carries around a brain” but a whole being. We are our bodies, and they are us. If you want it to feel better, you must treat it more kindly.
When you live with chronic illness, you often just can’t afford to make the sacrifices required for what might typically be a deemed a “perfect appearance”. You need to stay warm, eat well and exercise moderately. Neglect this, and you might look dashing, but it is unlikely you will be well enough to leave the house so that anyone might admire you.
If capitalism requires excess. Illness requires moderation.
“Get real and start throwing it out,” Lamott says in that same interview, referring to preconceived notions we hold of how we should and shouldn’t be. It is a reminder many of us need at this time of year, when advertisers and corporations spend millions to tell us otherwise.
The fact is, your thighs might look big in the dress. Your bum and your belly might too. People have very possibly noticed that spot on your face. Maybe the pigmentation.
And you know what, it’s fine.