I Talk To My Body Like Staff

Listen to what actually gets said, over a day.

Come on. Not now. Just get through this. Why are you doing this today of all days. Two more hours. Do not do this to me now.

Every one of those is either an instruction or a complaint. There is no third category anywhere in the transcript.

And there is a particular tone in it that you would recognize immediately if you heard somebody use it on another person. It is the tone of a tired manager with an underperforming member of staff who is not quite bad enough to let go.

Not cruel. Just entirely functional, faintly exasperated, and permanently on the edge of disappointment.

I have listened to a great many women describe this and almost none of them had ever noticed it, because there is nobody else in the conversation to be surprised by it.

So let us do what nobody has done, which is to read the transcript out loud.

An employer who does not know the terms

Here is the strange thing about the arrangement, and it is worth noticing before anything else.

Even an employer knows the terms.

An employer knows what the person is for, what they were hired to do, and what happens when they do it well. There is a review, there is a wage, there is some acknowledgment somewhere in the year.

Your body has never had any of that. It has had instructions for forty years and no acknowledgment at any point, no year in which anything went well enough to be said out loud, and no idea what it would have to do to receive a kind sentence.

You are living with something that has taken orders for forty years without one word back, and no length of service anywhere has ever once gone that unremarked. Scripture in 1 Corinthians 12 puts more abundant honor on the parts thought least honorable, and the Spirit of God is the one who says the first kind thing out loud.

That is a worse arrangement than employment, and nobody chose it.

You are running something that has never once had a good year on record, and no employment anywhere has ever been that thin. The Holy Spirit is what plays a transcript back to a woman who has never heard it, and 1 Corinthians 12 says what gets done with the parts nobody thinks much of.

And here is the second half, which is about what tone does.

Tone is not decoration. A body that has been addressed in one register for forty years has been informed of something, continuously, and it did not need a single explicit sentence to get the message.

The message is that this body is a problem being managed.

Nobody said that. The tone said it, four hundred times a week, for four decades.

You are being told something by a tone rather than by a sentence, and it has never once had to be said out loud to be received. Scripture in 1 Corinthians 12 says that on the members we think less honorable we bestow more abundant honor, and the Spirit of God is the one who changes the register a woman speaks in.

More abundant honor

There is a passage in 1 Corinthians about the parts of a body, and one verse in it is about deliberate policy.

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour. (1 Corinthians 12:23, King James Version)

Read what is being described. It is not a feeling.

Those we think less of. Paul grants that there are parts we rate lower, and he does not argue with the rating, and that is worth noticing on its own. He says what is done about it and nothing more.

Upon these we bestow more abundant honor. Bestow is an action. Abundant is a quantity. This is a deliberate policy of giving more, on purpose, to the parts that get least.

You are shown a policy rather than a feeling, and nobody in that verse has ever once been asked to change their opinion first. It is written in 1 Corinthians 12 that upon the less honorable we bestow more abundant honor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman something to do rather than something to feel.

And notice the direction, because it is the reverse of every instinct.

More goes to the ones that get least. Not equal, and not proportional to how highly anybody rates them. More abundant, deliberately, to the parts that were rated lowest.

Which means the part of your body that has taken the most complaints for the longest is, by that policy, the one due the most honor. Not because the rating was wrong. Because that is what the arrangement in a body actually is.

You are looking at a policy that sends more to whatever got least, and there has never once been a version of it that first required a better opinion. The Spirit of God is what changes what a woman does before it changes what she thinks, and the written word says upon these we bestow more abundant honor.

One sentence that is neither

So here is the assignment, and it is one sentence long.

Say one sentence to your own body tonight that is not an instruction and not a complaint.

That is the whole test and it rules out almost everything you would normally say. It rules out come on. It rules out doing fine, keep going, which is an instruction wearing a kind coat. It rules out sorry, which is a complaint with the direction reversed.

What is left is a very small category, and it is mostly acknowledgment, which is the plainest kind of care there is.

You are able to give acknowledgment where you have only ever given instructions, and a kind sentence has never once had to be earned by performance. 1 Corinthians 12 says upon those members which we think to be less honorable we bestow more abundant honor, and the Holy Spirit is what changes the tone a woman uses with her own body.

This body carried three people through last year. It has not had a full night since March and it has not once stopped. These hands have done everything in this house. It got through that and nobody said anything at the time.

Out loud, once, in an empty room.

And do not follow it with an instruction. That is the hard part. The sentence has to be allowed to end without a so or a therefore, because the moment there is a therefore, it has become a management conversation again.

You are able to say one thing that asks for nothing, and no sentence in forty years has ever once been allowed to end without a therefore. The written word in 1 Corinthians 12 bestows more abundant honor on the parts that get least, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one spoken sentence into care rather than into a technique.