The First Time I Thought I Was Dying

By Sarah Walker

A dazzling collection of essays that unpacks our unruly bodies and minds and questions why we are taught to fear and punish them, from an exciting and award-winning new author. We live in a world that expects us to be constantly in control of ourselves. Our bodies and minds, though, have other ideas. In this striking debut, artist and writer Sarah Walker wrestles with the awkward spaces where anatomy meets society: body image and Photoshop, phobias and religion, sex scenes and onstage violence, death and grief. Her luminous writing is at once specific and universal as she mines the limits of anxiety, intimacy and control. Sharp-witted and poignant, this collection of essays explores our unruly bodies and asks how we might learn to embrace our own chaos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780702265099

Book preview

Praise for Sarah Walker

‘The First Time I Thought I Was Dying blew me away. In this unparalleled age of self-surveillance – a peak moment for body-estrangement – Walker reacquaints us with the true sorcery of the senses, and with the inner life awakened by loving the body in all its animal unruliness. The essays in this collection are engrossing, unflinching, vitalising and wise.’ – Rebecca Giggs

‘In these essays Sarah Walker outstares shame, outwits the spectre of self-commodification and outclasses so much of contemporary writing on bodies and embodiment. An unafraid and thrilling book.’ – Maria Tumarkin

‘A stunning portrait of a body as captured by the eye of a true artist. Walker has found just the right words to describe its mystery, and how we live within it, in all its gnarly and wonderful glory.’ – Jacinta Parsons

‘Breathtakingly good, darkly funny and deeply true. I was furious when I had to interrupt my reading to put the book down and live.’ – Virginia Gay

Sarah Walker is a writer, artist and photographer. She makes work about anxiety, control and intimacy in text, video and immersive installation across Australia and internationally. She is a Walkley-nominated essayist and critic, and co-hosted the podcast Contact Mic. She is also one of Australia’s most experienced arts photographers. She lives on Wadawurrung country in Geelong, Australia, where she surfs (badly) and gardens (also badly).

Contents

Introduction

Healing Brush

Stage Directions

Honeycomb and Waterfall

Yes Yes No

Abject Euphoria

Inside Out

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying

Contested Breath

Acknowledgements

Notes on Sources

Introduction

If my thoughts had a genre, it would be body horror. For as long as I can remember, I have been suspicious of my body. I do not trust the thing that I inhabit: its bulging, explosive possibilities, its embarrassing unwillingness to behave.

My earliest memory is from kindergarten, aged three. One of the staff members came reeling away from the playground with an enormous chunk of bark jutting from the white of her palm. I recall the silence that sank over the assembled children as we stood, watching this suburban crucifixion. She held the hand out in supplication, as if to say: this is not correct. A thing from the outside was inside her, under the elegant slip of her skin. This was also my first lesson: constant vigilance is required.

I work in industries where the body is central. In the theatre, it becomes the vessel through which stories take form. As a photographer, I trade in the act of manipulation. It is my job to be attentive to the shifts and eddies of the physical self, its authority and its impulsivity. I capture bodies when they gesture in beams of light, and I tidy their little clumps of sprouting hairs. All the while, I am aware that I move through the world in a vessel that regularly erupts into disorder. In thousands of little ways, it refuses to be tidy and simple. Just as interminable are my attempts to keep it in check, plastering over that which is not neat, slicking myself into something professional and reliable. I fail, constantly. No matter how carefully I plug the holes, the chaos gets out.

I grew up convinced that if I tried hard enough, I would be in control. I would no longer live at the mercy of a body and mind that I struggled to organise and understand. I thought of myself as a machine. Complicated, certainly, but knowable, if only I studied hard enough. If I fed it correctly and moved it right, if I followed its wiring with sufficient care, I would be able to master it. I blamed myself for muddling the equation with physical and mental illness, with a body that burst into unrequested action or sank into untimely torpor. I rued my animal unruliness.

It was a psychologist who first pointed out that the harder I tried to keep it together, the worse things became. The phrase ‘keep it together’ implies struggling against fracture. Coalescing takes effort. I began to wonder: what would happen if I stopped expecting myself to behave? There is power here. The out-of-control body can be a radical site. A place of small revolution against the judgements and rigours of a highly coded world. To consider the self as unpredictable is to open the door to uncertainty and to welcome it. It is also to begin to notice how our world both causes stress and punishes us for responding to it. To begin asking the questions that raise eyebrows, about how much our bodies can or should be controlled, by us or by our society.

When you’re looking for it, there is chaos everywhere. To expect it is to make failure feel a bit less shit. To speak about what is hidden is to strip it of shame. To recognise when and how the world presses against us is to make the violence of our reactions feel less surprising.

These essays were written across a wild year. The pandemic raged while I navigated grief. Bodies became central in my own thinking as they gained priority globally. Conversations about mental and physical health and the ways we are coded, down to the skin, were everywhere. These essays are about body image, about sex, about art, about performance and privacy, abjection and absurdity. They are about what we expect of ourselves and each other, and how we could think more kindly about our bodies. They are about what we might let go of, and what we might fight for. Most of all, they are about our great fizzing fear of the unknown, and how desperately we organise our lives in order to quell that fear.

This is the lesson I am trying to teach myself now: be not afraid.

Healing Brush

The first thing you need to know is that the camera always lies. Light the subject from above, and cheekbones emerge from the face. Add a softbox, and the years slide away. The camera is a machine, and data gains meaning in the interpretation. Photographs reveal only that reality is changeable, labile. Shift a reflector and the world moves with it. The ultimate lesson is that the most powerful force is light.

I remember the exact moment I realised I was fat. It was Christmas. I was twelve. I was standing in my grandmother’s spare room, the lace curtains filtering the sunlight into soft licks. I remember the pants distinctly: a pair of pale-blue and white short trousers, fitted at the thighs. They were patterned with flowers, a pastel Eden. As I passed the mirror, I saw a stranger. The body I had looked at my whole life had shifted in a single moment of monstrous clarity. The thighs strained the seams of the floral pants. The stomach was distended and bloated. Only the face I recognised as mine. I had the sensation of expanding uncontrollably, fat bubbling under my skin, flooding my clothes. As a child, I had checked the mirror to admire my surfaces: outfits and expressions. I had never given much thought to what lay underneath. In this room smelling of powder, I looked at myself for the first time with an adult gaze. I looked at my body and used a word I had never used for it before and, in doing so, I was altered irrevocably. Words are weapons. As I called myself fat, I went to war.

In the study of our family home, there was a wall of photographs, decades made flat and speared with silver pins, the images near the window slowly bleached blue by the sun. Across the wall, my brother and I grew from squalling babies to doughy toddlers to laughing children. In the upper-left corner was a photograph from my parents’ wedding. My father would stand in front of it and cluck. In the photo, he wears a brown suit, louche and winking, full of saucy charm. ‘I’m going to fit back into that suit,’ he would say. ‘Look at me now. I’m a fatty.’

He was his own white whale: the impossible goal that is the past self. I would gaze from his broad, muscled body that I loved to climb, which wore children on its shoulders like parrots, to the lanky slip of a man in the photo, cigarette pressed between his fingers. The groom did not look capable of dispensing my father’s hugs: secure and grass-scented and the size of the world.

The family scales were ivory-coloured, stained with dust and age. I weighed myself daily. The first time the needle moved down, I felt a bright shudder of delight. The thrill of achievement. Of success.

In the wedding photograph, my mother looks drawn and shy. Her dress sits loose on her hips. It is only her wrists that hint at the delicacy of the body under the fabric. My father had agreed to marry her on the condition that she put on five kilograms. Cruel to be kind. As a child, I would pull out her wedding veil and prance around in it, squinting at the world through the lace. The memories that remain from the years of my diminishing look the same: fuzzy and white. The weight loss was fairly linear, but the details stutter and jag. I don’t know whether I was too malnourished to form memories correctly, or whether the tedium of my thoughts from that time was so profound that my brain can’t be bothered to replay them. Numbers and bones.

A recent US study of women from childhood through to old age found that ninety-one per cent were dissatisfied with their bodies. Body dissatisfaction is so common in women that in 1984, a suite of researchers called it ‘normative discontent’. Men are not immune. Forty-five per cent of Western men are unhappy with their bodies to some extent. Twenty-five per cent of Australian men in a healthy weight range believe that they are fat. The collective weight of the dismay directed at the world’s mirrors must be heavy indeed.

We had, at the time, one of the first Canon digital cameras. A wide black thing, heavy, with a dark iris that winked slowly at the subject. It took tiny, grainy images. At my very lightest, I snapped a photo in the mirror, side-on, in my underwear. It was a day when my vision slipped a little, like the memory of fainting, and I felt a thrill of terror at the slightness of me. In my twenties, I found the camera and tried plugging it in, but couldn’t find a software driver to run it.

Years passed, and the camera vanished, thrown out at some point in one of my mother’s periodic culls. I longed for that image. Longed for the proof of it. There are no photos of my whole body at that time, just hints of the wreckage – blue fingers from the arms of a tracksuit, a drawn face with wispy hair above it. I felt the loss of the jagged pixels in that image for their authority, their indexicality. The evidence of what I once was, and wasn’t.

Even the food I remember was white. I would choose special snacks and set times far into the future when I would be allowed to eat them. They took on an almost holy significance. Once, I was given a free supermarket sample of a single boiled egg, shucked of its shell, suspended in a solution of brine. It was encased in a clear vacuum-packed bag, and it floated there, pale and glossed and perfect. Mysterious, somehow. Like an eye turned inward, or some alien organ, function unknown. I coveted the egg with a sort of unhinged wonder.

I brought it home and stored it in the cheese drawer of the fridge. I would pull it out and hold it, determined to save it for some special day. I imagined slipping the slick white into my mouth and biting down, the rich, chalky yolk like a hidden treasure. I kept it for weeks, biding my time. When the day finally arrived to eat it, I crept off at recess to unpackage my prize, all seventy glorious calories of it. When I sliced open the plastic sachet, the smell hit me immediately. I had waited too long. The egg plopped into the metal rubbish bin with a dull wet thunk.

The weight dropped etc. etc. Plateaued etc. etc. I doubled down etc. etc. You know this story. You’ve heard it before. Like a stock image, it is too familiar. You’ve heard it told too many times. The details shift slightly. Only the endings are different.

I came out of it like someone waking from deep sleep, like rising through dark water. At sixteen, I had been sent home again by the school nurse. I cannot remember her face, just the light through the doorway to her office, on the edge of a courtyard filled with roses. My mother made me lunch for the first time in years. I sat at the kitchen table eating a mug of packet soup and a sandwich. It was more food than I’d eaten in one sitting in a long time.

There was a strange and unfamiliar feeling. It started as a spark in my chest and trickled outwards. I felt life spread through me, the nourishment warm in my bones. It felt as though I’d cleaned my glasses: the world crisp and solid and real. I realised, quietly and stupidly, cow-like, daft, that food made you feel good. That the brittle, toffee-like fragility of existence was softened by eating. In that moment, I stepped from one life into another. My memories of the years after bloom with bright, saturated colour.

In my twenties, I revealed to a female friend my starved little secret. I was expecting hushed words, shock, pity. Instead, she nodded. ‘So, basically, you were a teenage girl?’

The shift was sudden and soft. There was no diagnosis, no clinic, no specialists. I knew I had been sick. There was a tinge of terrible pride, though, at having carved myself into a new shape, and an attendant shame at having lost the capacity for that craftsmanship.

At university, my newfound