One Body, Five Frameworks
ok so here’s the thing nobody explains to you when you’re growing up in darwin: your body is not your own. like, it belongs to you, sure, but it also belongs to five other things at the same time and none of those things have agreed on what it is or what it’s for.
let me break it down.
saturday morning. I’m in ceremony. ochre on my skin, the real stuff, patterns that have been placed on bodies like mine for longer than anyone can put a number to. and in that I’m not just me. the body isn’t mine in the way it’s mine when I’m at the gym. It’s more like... I’m a surface for something older. country. ancestors. the people who came before me doing the same thing in the same place with the same meaning. I’m a link in something and the body is how i participate in that. It’s not spiritual in the way white australians mean when they say spiritual. It’s more like... physical? the painting is the connection. the body is the site of the connection. this is real and it matters and it’s been mattering here since before anyone invented the word ceremony.
then it’s tuesday and I’m at the gym and I’m doing my third set of incline press and I’m filming it for the gram because the lighting’s good and I’ve been at this for two years and the progress is real and why wouldn’t i post it. and the comments come in and the numbers do what numbers do and I’m in the whole global thing now—the macros and the stacks and the programmes and the community of dudes everywhere doing the same calculation. body as project. inputs, outputs, track the progress, iterate. There’s nothing ancestral about this. There’s nothing local about this. It’s just me and the barbell and the market that decided what a body getting better requires.
and both of those things are true. the ceremony body and the gym body are the same body. i don’t feel a contradiction in the moment. i feel a contradiction when i try to explain it to someone who thinks bodies have to be one thing.
then there’s the law. i grew up here. i know the land. i know what my people’s relationship to this country looks like when it’s unmediated by the stuff that got put on top of it. and i know that if i walked down to a public beach and took my clothes off I’d be up for indecent exposure. colonial inheritance, still running, 2024. the same laws that came for my ancestors’ practices are still there. not like, actively hunting me down. just there. a condition. one of the conditions. the ceremony is older than the law and the law doesn’t care.
ngl that one sits weird.
my supplements come from a warehouse in sydney or sometimes the us. i order online. unflavoured creatine, a whey that doesn’t mess with my stomach, a pre that isn’t too much. i track my protein. i know roughly where i am in relation to my bodyweight targets. this is completely normal. this is what people do. the body as a project that you manage with inputs is just... the assumption. nobody interrogates it. i don’t really interrogate it. It’s just what lifting is now. the global consumer market decided what the body in progress requires and I’m a customer.
and then church. my family goes. i go sometimes. It’s not like i have a strong personal theology, it’s more like—these are my people, this is where they are on sunday, the community matters, the connection matters. but church has a thing about how you present. modesty as a default assumption. the body covered appropriately, the body not making a statement about itself. and that’s just... absorbed. It’s been absorbed for generations. it doesn’t feel like an imposition anymore, it just feels like how you are in that room. and then i walk out and post a shirtless photo and nobody in my family says anything because the contexts are different and everyone understands that the contexts are different.
five things. one body.
and nobody—not the ceremony elders, not the fitness community, not the law, not the supplement company, not the church—has sat down and worked out what the body is when it’s all five at once. why would they. each of those things is a full world with its own internal logic and its own account of what a body is for. the ceremony knows. the gym knows. the law definitely thinks it knows. the supplement market has decided. the church has a position.
they just haven’t talked to each other.
and I’m the conversation that isn’t happening.
What’s funny—not funny ha ha, funny as in make it make sense—is that I’m not in crisis about it. this is just how it is. i grew up with contradictory information coming from too many directions to count. That’s just content. That’s just tuesday. you don’t resolve it. you navigate it. you know which version of yourself is required in which context and you bring that one and then you bring a different one somewhere else. code switching but for your whole body.
the hard bit is when the contexts bleed. when someone from church sees the instagram. when someone at the gym asks about the ceremonies and wants a neat explanation that fits inside their framework. when the law makes itself felt on country where it has no business being. those moments when the contexts that are supposed to stay separate don’t stay separate—that’s when the five things stop being manageable and start being a weight.
but mostly they stay separate. mostly i manage.
I’m twenty-nine. i live in darwin. i do ceremonies. i post selfies. i know about the law. i buy supplements. i go to church sometimes. these are all true at the same time and i am all of them at the same time and there is no version of me that is only one of them.
That’s not a problem to be solved.
That’s just what it is to be me, in this body, in this country, in this moment.
one body. five frameworks. no resolution.
just living.
and honestly? That’s enough.
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