Please move this if there is a forum where it's best seen.
I don't know how it kicked in, but I'm both fighting and trying to force body horror onto myself.
For a while I've been ashamed of how much I like physical things, knowing that intelligent, non-neurotypical people hate them and want to be a machine or a formless consciousness, so I should too. So I made myself read testaments from people who do feel this way, and they make good points:
The human body is 90% microbes, is constantly excreting and dirty, and all our physical beauty is a cover for a nasty mess of meat and organs. We really are like a bag of junk that leaks if punctured. Someone points out that the only difference between you and a gorgeous celebrity is an extremely superficial outside, and they're just as hideous and disgusting in reality. That our minds aren't meant to grasp the reality of things, so we focus on the superficial, pleasing aspects.
Part of me wants to just not care; in fact, the most natural thing for me to do is not care. From a stand-back point of view, I tend to find physiology pretty interesting, miraculous at best, no big deal at worst. But I know that's wrong and the right way to be is disgusted. I see a number of people expressing what I fear experiencing: looking at a person, however attractive, and being repulsed and disgusted by the recollection of their body functions. Or looking at normal people doing normal things and seeing grotesque, animated meat. I don't want to do that, but I'm trying to force it. I just can't though, it just doesn't matter to me, even though it should.
Someone else posted this quote, which just furthers the point that the body is inherently disgusting:
Quote:
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This is the bodys nature: it is a collection of over three hundred bones, jointed by one hundred and eighty joints, bound together by nine hundred sinews, plastered over with nine hundred pieces of flesh, enveloped in the moist inner skin, enclosed in the outer cuticle, with orifices here and there, constantly dribbling and trickling like a grease pot, inhabited by a community of worms, the home of disease, the basis of painful states, perpetually oozing from the nine orifices like a chronic open carbuncle, from both of whose eyes eye-filth trickles, from whose ears comes ear-filth, from whose nostrils snot, from whose mouth food and bile and phlegm and blood, from whose lower outlets excrement and urine, and from whose ninety-nine thousand pores the broth of stale sweat seeps, with bluebottles and their like buzzing round it, which when untended with tooth sticks and mouth-washing and head-anointing and bathing and underclothing and dressing would, judged by the universal repulsiveness of the body, make even a king, if he wandered from village to village with his hair in its natural wild disorder, no different from a flower-scavenger or an outcaste or what you will. So there is no distinction between a kings body and an outcastes in so far as its impure stinking nauseating repulsiveness is concerned. But by rubbing out the stains on its teeth with tooth sticks and mouthwashing and all that, by concealing its private parts under several cloths, by daubing it with various scents and salves, by pranking it with nosegays and such things, it is worked up into a state that permits of its being taken as I and mine. So men delight in women and women in men without perceiving the true nature of its characteristic foulness, now masked by this adventitious adornment. But in the ultimate sense there is no place here even the size of an atom fit to lust after. And then, when any such bits of it as head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, spittle, snot, excrement or urine have dropped off the body, beings will not touch them; they are ashamed, humiliated and disgusted. But as long as anyone of these things remains in it, though it is just as repulsive, they take it as agreeable, desirable, permanent, pleasant, self, because they are wrapped in the murk of ignorance and dyed with affection and greed for self. Taking it as they do, they resemble the old jackal who saw a flower not yet fallen from a kiísuka tree in a forest and yearned after it, thinking, This is a piece of meat, it is a piece of meat. There was a jackal chanced to see A flowering kiísuka in a wood; In haste he went to where it stood: I have found a meat-bearing tree! He chewed the blooms that fell, but could, Of course, find nothing fit to eat; He took it thus: Unlike the meat There on the tree, this is no good. A wise man will not think to treat As foul only the part that fell, But treats as foul the part as well That in the body has its seat. Fools cannot in their folly tell; They take the body to be fair, And soon get caught in Evils snare Nor can escape its painful spell. But since the wise have thus laid bare This filthy bodys nature, so, Be it alive or dead, they know There is no beauty lurking there. For this is said: This filthy body stinks outright Like ordure, like a privys site; This body men that have insight Condemn, as object of a fools delight. A tumour where nine holes abide Wrapped in a coat of clammy hide And trickling filth on every side, Polluting the air with stenches far and wide. If it perchance should come about That what is inside it came out, Surely a man would need a knout With which to put the crows and dogs to rout.
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I don't want to feel this way, but I know I should. Like I said, smarter, better, more evolved people feel this way and long to be robots, "pure beings of light" or simply disembodied minds. The thought of any of those things is terrifying to me, again because I don't mind my body. I admit I could do without gross excretions, but I would also dearly miss eating, sleeping, textures, weather, and other perceptions.
However, as I think, even the process of eating, for example, becomes horrific - pulverizing substances and forcing them down a tube to a mini vat of acid to be broken down further. Doesn't it sound crude and undignified? How could I have not have realized how disgusting life is before? Even cute and beautiful things follow these same patterns, they're so universal and normal we think nothing of it. How can I find pleasure in anything physical, I'm pathetic and as disgusting as the life I inhabit. I can see where the body haters come from now. I'm just realizing the sum of the squick I experience regarding my own body, which I normally like so much and want to care for, when I should hate it, because even the pleasureable things are disgusting...
God, what do I do?