Body Wall

You are not an outline on a sheet of paper. You are an inside and an outside — and between them lies a wall. Not of bricks, not of concrete, but no less load-bearing: muscles that hold you upright. Fascia that keeps your organs in place. Connective tissue that connects everything and simultaneously separates. Skin that encloses and delimits you. These layers together form your body wall. It holds your contents together. It decides what comes in and what stays outside.

And sometimes it is precisely this wall that speaks up. An abdominal wall that gives way. A back musculature that dissolves into weakness. A chest wall that with every breath stingingly reminds you it is there. A hernia, an umbilical hernia, stretch marks, a diastasis, a fascia that tears. Medicine then speaks of hernial orifices, of tissue weakness, of structural insufficiency. That is not wrong — but it is incomplete.