Denial Is the Strongest Muscle in the Human Body.

This article is written by guest writer Leigh Ann Ruggiero. She is a writer and professor at Great Falls College. After living in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Maryland, she's found Montana a place she can finally stargaze without the interference of light pollution. Visit her on social media at @larswrites.

Picture: David J Laporte, via Wikimedia Commons.

Denial Is the Strongest Muscle in the Human Body

I sit on the couch across from my therapist, angry, like so many clients before me.

I’m so angry I can’t isolate the source because it’s everything. It’s the second hand ticking, my collar chafing my neck, the way someone at lunch swallowed their food. 

When I started coming here, I didn’t believe in “angry.” Other people felt that, not me.

What a difference seven years make.

My therapist notices my stertorous breath and asks, “Have you thought about self-care?”

I stare at the stretch of carpet under the window. She and I have dubbed it the fly graveyard. Tiny black carcasses litter the ground, even though she vacuums the office every morning.

Some days I envy them.

I look up again.

“I don’t even know what ‘self-care’ means.” 

That was a lie. I did know what it meant. A little.

Self-care means taking care of yourself. But any child knows not to use words in their own definitions.

Two winters ago, I made it one of my goals. Then the pandemic came and, for most of us, took away the small gestures of self-care we didn’t even know we had.

I was in Montana, which has always been an outlier state. In the contiguous U.S. we hold the record for both the lowest temperature (seventy below at Rogers Pass) and the largest population of grizzly bears (estimated at over a thousand). We elected the first woman to Congress, in 1916, and have the world’s shortest river.

 When it came to the pandemic, we were no different. As other states’ hospitals neared capacity, our governor urged us to seek refuge outdoors. It’s on our bumper stickers: Get Lost (in Montana).

How do you reconcile sheltering in place with getting lost? You walk with friends, six feet apart, just to wipe the fog from the mirror.

You do this with . . . a lot of people. You see your friends in other states, immured in their Zoom squares, but you’re accepting every invitation thrown at you. 

It’s as if the rules don’t apply.

You remember once, when you were a kid in church, being admonished not to wear spaghetti straps lest you tempt the male parishioners. You never wore them anyway.

Then, too, the rules didn’t apply.

At fourteen, you never considered a world where you would say yes to spaghetti straps.

At thirty-six, you never considered a world where you would say no to your friends.

It isn’t the first time you’ve done this—said yes to others and no to yourself. It’s just the first time you’ve done it in the middle of a pandemic.

It hits different. 

You feel yourself slipping away. 

Well, not all of yourself. The anger’s back. The anger and the envy of the graveyard flies. You wonder what the difference is—between the emptiness in your chest and those desiccated shells. 

Are you just a husk?

I’m wrong, you think, but you aren’t sure.

I was wrong, but I’d also hit a wall.

Not a wall. The wall.

These are the moments to pay attention: when you find yourself envying something so shriveled it’s unrecognizable.

Self-care isn’t “taking care of yourself”—not like that. Not like you’re a pile of unswept dust.

It’s seeing yourself. Maybe for the first time in your life.

Because how do you care for a self you don’t recognize? How do you care when the heart in your chest dried up so long ago you’ve forgotten what waters it?

Because it’s easier that way. Because not knowing means not wasting time or energy or feelings, all of which are more precious than gold.

Or this is what I told myself.

I have spent most of my adult life in denial. It’s a combination of that Protestant work ethic, a desire for distraction, and the fear of slipping below the water line.

Because if you don’t say it aloud, the wish comes true.

Because if you refuse to look at the problem, it doesn’t really exist.

We all do this. It’s a coping mechanism, sometimes the only one we have.

But there is a tipping point when we rely on it so much that we lose not only the feeling, but also the feeling’s tether—our mind, body, soul.

Ourselves.

Denial is the art of saying no. It’s the art of saying, If I don’t pay attention, it’ll just go away.

Self-care is the art of saying yes.

Not to our friends. Not to our job. To ourselves.

Suffering is inevitable; it desiccates us. There is never a state where it disappears, but there is a state where we can watch it happen and let it go. We can hurt, but we can also create from that place of hurt. 

Even if that creation is a single breath.

But first we must look at ourselves.

Without denial or judgment.

With honesty.

Okakura Kakuzō writes in The Book of Tea, “Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognize it.”

That is to say perfection isn’t a thing singular, but things plural 

It’s complicated. (Aren’t we all?)

Honesty is recognizing that complication. 

These ideas aren’t new. People have been praying, chanting, and singing them for thousands of years.

What’s new is that I’m the one writing them and you’re the one reading them.

So take a breath for yourself.