We commonly say that we “have” a body. The grammar is so ordinary that its strangeness disappears. I have a body in the same way I have a coat, a house, or a problem. Somewhere inside is the real me: the mind, the will, the soul, the decision-maker. The body is the equipment that carries me around.
This idea has saturated Western culture for so long that it feels like common sense. It appears in religion, medicine, diet culture, productivity culture, and everyday speech. We tell people to control their bodies, overcome their biology, master their appetites, and get out of their own way. We praise mind over matter. We treat bodily needs as interruptions to the work of being a person.
But you do not have a body. You are bodily.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty returned the body to philosophy by refusing to treat it as an object observed by a detached mind. We do not first exist as pure consciousness and then use a body to collect information. The body is the standpoint from which anything becomes perceptible at all. It is not between us and the world. It is how there is a world for us.
That world is not identical for every body. A person who cannot see does not simply inhabit a sighted world with one channel removed. Space, distance, movement, familiarity, and attention are organized through other senses. A person living with chronic pain enters a room differently from a person who expects movement to be painless. A child whose body has been treated as a problem learns a different world from a child whose movement is welcomed.
I knew early that my body did not move through the world in the expected way. Disability can be isolating for a child, not only because of physical limits but because environments quietly announce which bodies they were built to receive. Stairs, games, classrooms, noise, pace, and other people’s stares create an orientation. They tell you where you fit and where you do not.
Books gave me another orientation. In a book, I could enter a life from the inside. I could inhabit another person’s perception for a while. Movies can show us another world, but books construct it within us. They recruit our memory, sensation, and imagination. They let a child whose physical world feels narrow discover that experience itself is not.
Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology helps extend the question. What happens to people who are denied the opportunity to live according to their own sense of the world? Bodies are oriented by the paths available to them. Some directions are made easy and natural; others are blocked, punished, or rendered unintelligible. What we call an individual preference or personal failure may be a history of which routes were opened and which were closed.
This matters because the myth of the detached individual hides those histories. If a mind is presumed to stand outside the body and independently choose its course, then every outcome can be assigned to character. Health becomes virtue. Illness becomes failure. Thinness becomes discipline. Addiction becomes weakness. Productivity becomes evidence of worth. The environment disappears, and the individual is left holding responsibility for every force that has passed through her.
Even our descriptions of personality carry this assumption. I have often said that I do not make safe choices, that caution is simply not in my nature. But what is a “nature” in this sense? The phrase turns a pattern into an essence. It hides the nervous system that learned what intensity feels like, the relationships that shaped expectations, the rewards attached to risk, the stories a culture tells about courage, and the many previous moments that made one action more available than another.
This does not mean patterns are unreal. It means they are processes rather than permanent substances. A person can be impulsive without possessing an inner object called impulsiveness. A person can be anxious without anxiety revealing her truest self. We are relatively stable because bodies predict from the past, environments repeat themselves, and familiar pathways become easier to travel. Stability is not proof of an unchanging essence.
Merleau-Ponty later used the idea of the chiasm—the crossing or intertwining—to describe the relation between perceiver and perceived. One hand touches the other and, in the same encounter, is itself touchable. We see the world while remaining visible within it. The body and world are distinct, but never cleanly separable. They meet, cross, and shape one another.
This is more than an abstract claim. It changes how we understand distress. If the body is an object owned by the mind, bodily reactions become obstacles to correct thinking. If the person is an embodied relationship with a world, then anxiety, hunger, exhaustion, and pain are not messages from a foreign thing. They are events within the whole organism-environment system.
The shift is subtle but enormous. Instead of asking, “Why is my body doing this to me?” we can ask, “What conditions is my body responding to?” Instead of “Why can’t I control myself?” we can ask, “What has made this response available, and what might make another response possible?”
These questions do not guarantee pleasant answers. Bodies can malfunction. Disease can be cruel. Adaptations can persist after the danger is gone. An explanation is not a justification, and understanding is not the same as approval. But the questions move us out of a civil war in which an imaginary self tries to conquer the only self that has ever existed.
You do not have a body that must be forced into submission before your real life can begin. Your body is the form your life takes.
About the author
Jennifer Nickell, RD
Jennifer Nickell is a registered dietitian and nutrition educator whose work connects nutrition science with human development, adult learning, eating behavior, and real-life conditions.
Educational information only. This article is not individualized medical or nutrition treatment.