The Invisible Jury

For a long time I had the feeling of living under observation.

As though an invisible committee had been appointed to assess every detail: body, age, clothes, work, home, money, even the person beside me.

There were no judges and no written verdicts.

And yet the verdict seemed to arrive anyway.

We have become extremely good at reading bodies as if they were documents.

Thin: discipline. Muscular: strength. Tired: failure. Attractive: success. Older: decline. Young: potential.

We assign entire biographies to flesh.

We turned the body into a CV and then act surprised when everyone feels under examination.

The problem is not wanting to look good. We can train, dress, change, take care of ourselves, enjoy being desired.

The problem begins when care becomes evidence.

When every room feels like an interview and the body has to introduce us before we have even spoken.

The body before the audience

A body is not a summary of competence.

It is memory, age, illness, desire, fatigue, pleasure, scars, hormones, sleep, grief, appetite and time.

It changes because life changes.

And yet we keep demanding that it remain legible enough to reassure whoever is looking.

Before it is seen, a body has to be lived.

That sentence matters to me because it moves the centre of gravity back where it belongs.

My body is not here primarily to convince somebody else.

It is the place from which I experience the world.

The jury enters before we do

Sometimes nobody has said anything.

We enter a room already anticipating the comment, the comparison, the category.

The invisible jury does not always live outside us.

Often it has learned our address.

That is why one glance can change posture, expression, voice, even desire.

We begin managing ourselves instead of living.

Social media did not invent this mechanism, but it gave it an excellent office.

Now we can inspect ourselves from outside almost continuously.

We can edit, crop, repeat, compare and measure.

Visibility comes with analytics.

And the body becomes one more dashboard.

The duty to perform

We are told to be ourselves, but preferably the convincing version.

Healthy but not obsessed. Sexy but not desperate. Ageing well but not appearing to try. Confident but never arrogant.

It is an exhausting job description for something that was supposed to be a body.

The duty to perform.
The right to inhabit ourselves.

To inhabit ourselves does not mean giving up care.

It means refusing to turn care into a permanent audition.

It means accepting that a body can have value without presenting credentials every time it enters a room.

I am interested in the possibility of a quieter relationship with ourselves.

Not perfect acceptance. Not motivational slogans in a bathroom mirror.

Just a little less administration.

A little less judging ourselves before anyone else gets the chance.

Perhaps the real luxury is not having a body everybody approves of.

It is being able, at least sometimes, to feel at home in your own.