Our Body is a Calendar
On seasons and emotions
The dirt smells a certain way in mid-March: fresh, willing, damp with expectation. The light is different, too. Crisp and clean and hopeful. But, if you are like me, there’s also a feeling of unease this year. March 10th marks one year since we began closing our doors to neighbors, laying off beloved employees, watching press conferences with confusing messages, working double shifts at hospitals, and making last visits to loved ones.
Last March altered and impacted our psyches and our bodies. A few weeks ago, I noticed I wasn’t sleeping well. Despite the warmer weather, I had an underlying feeling of dread. There’s a word for when we experience unsettling feelings, thoughts, or memories on the anniversary of a significant experience: trauma anniversary. While human societies measure time in days, weeks, and months, our bodies are keeping their own calendar.
I first learned about trauma anniversaries from my grandmother, Lucille, who would retire to her room every October, the month her daughter was killed in a car accident. Even at the age of 101, her body marked the time of year with grief and sometimes illness. As we accrue life experience, our bodies become an archive of love and loss, synced to the seasons. In a 1998 Yale study, veterans with PTSD experienced depression and illness around the same time of year as their original trauma. This can happen collectively as well as individually. For many New Yorkers, for example, the clear blue skies of early September are a visceral reminder of 9/11.
We are wired for this. Our ancestors needed to remember when things happened: when the lions hunted, when the rivers dried up, when it was time to move South. Now, rather than attuning to the cycles of nature, we look to the Roman Calendar to know when it’s time to go back to school, celebrate a holiday, take time off from work. In this 9-5 grind culture--especially the era of endless zoom meetings--our animal instincts are often ignored, overridden, and flat out denied. This can result in illness, depression, and fatigue. And still, whether our conscious minds acknowledge it or not, our bodies recognize the quality of the sunlight, the length of the shadows, the return of birds, the budding of leaves. Our bodies remember when we experienced trauma and remind us to honor our sorrows or take a break.
My research into pleasure made me wonder about how we might create a new calendar for ourselves; one that correlates to our personal and collective histories as well as the seasons. Long ago, our ancestors organized their lives around the phases of the moon. Is there a modern equivalent for that, I wondered? Who today acknowledges the cycles of the moon in their work? “Cops do,” my neighbor Edwin Pastrana told me. He is a retired NYC police officer who sports a collection of t-shirts that say things like, I’ve got 99 problems and you’re not one of them. “Nobody wants the full moon shift,” he told me. “That’s when the crazies come out.” I’ve since asked teachers and first-responders about how the moon affects their work and they, too, have almost always echoed Pastrana’s sentiment. We humans are definitely synced to the moon.
Women are more likely to be in tune with the cyclical phases of their bodies by virtue of menstruation. However, very few women are taught to attune schedules to cycles. In recent years, several apps have entered the market that track users’ menstrual cycles and record emotional shifts and overall health as it relates to one’s cycle.
While we can do our best to note our body’s calendar, honoring it is nearly impossible as long as we are tied to an industrial economy that treats human bodies as machines. With timed bathroom breaks at the Amazon Warehouse, workers are trained and tracked for efficiency and productivity. More than 200 meatpacking workers have died as a result of not being able to take time off when sick during the Covid-19 pandemic. In late-capitalist America, enacting agency over our time is seen as an absurd luxury, not a human right.
Reclaiming that time is a part of the work of pleasure activism. Pleasure activism seeks to create new laws and cultures and foment traditions that honor the human body and all its innate intelligence. Imagine schools that applaud students for taking wellness days rather than having perfect attendance. Imagine abundant paid sick leave that includes a mandatory grief period for anyone who has suffered a loss. Rest days when needed. And why stop there? Why not build a world in which we can all have the time we need to grieve, rest, and celebrate. Imagine a world in which we can properly welcome children into the world, leave work to be with family and friends. In other words, let’s insist that we all have enough time to take our pleasure.
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
The United States of Anxiety has a great podcast out about time and capitalism. It also includes an interview with adrienne marie brown, author of Pleasure Activism and scholar of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowers. A truly great listen.
Some calendar ideas for tracking our moods and physical health.
Feeling the impact of this trauma anniversary? Join a Virtual Community Grief Ritual, a space to release sorrow, anger, fear, numbness in community on Sunday, March 14th.