Lamb Suit

Halloween 1993 was not a good Halloween. My mother had carefully handcrafted a fluffy lamb suit for me to wear to the annual Corporate Family Halloweeen gathering. The costume zipped all the way up the front and had two anatomically correct ears made of white polyfleece and pink felt. The outside was fluffy as a baked potato, but the inside was the most profane unnatural fiber from hell.

It was the earliest memory I can drudge up of feeling explicitly, violently wrong about a body. My body? Whose body? Who the hell knew. I was three for chrissake. All I knew was it was ITCHY and I was CRYING and my face was VERY RED. I wanted it off: Now, now, now, now, now.

It was not-me. Not in the sense that it didn't suit me. Rather, it was a foreign thing clinging to my skin that needed to come off before it grafted to me and I could never remove it. When you are four, the concept of costumes is utterly new/terrifying/disorienting. "I am just getting used to this body, and now you are trying to tell me that annually, I am supposed to invent some sort of different one, from itchy fleece or face paint or fabric or latex? For fun?"


Bodies haven't stopped being strange for me since that Halloween in the early 90's. There are periods of latency where I do not think about bodies as a separate thing (after all, Descartes was wrong, we do not have bodies, we are bodies, there is no dualism). Then there are the times when I look in the mirror and have the odd sensation of not only seeing not-me, but not being sure exactly from what point I am seeing at all.

Thankfully, that's pretty rare.