writing

HAND Reveals

Posted on by Juno Üjiié

Surprisingly, hands retain a sense of personhood almost as much as the face. They are often left untouched until later stage of dissection because working on their small and intricate surfaces requires skills and anatomical knowledge. Hands are another major interface with the outside world—not much socially but physically and emotionally. They are our probes into the physical world, our means of acting on intent, and a way to express emotions.  

When we are born, we are held with hands, fed with hands. The first contact with the outside world is through hands of our caregivers. Hands have a high concentration of nerve endings, and we navigate the world by touching. Our first instinct when we encountering something new is to reach out and touch it. If it is unpleasant, we learn to withdraw our hands. The more we touch, the more intricate our understanding of our environment becomes. 

What would happen when a naturally curious child exploring their word hear their parents say “Don’t touch it” again and again. It may be the child is about to touch hot surface and the adult intends to keep them from harm and injury. It may be the child is about to touch an expensive fragile object and the parent is afraid that they would break it. Every time a child hear “Don’t touch it” their world gets smaller and more dangerous. Their energetic reach out to the world is cut short. 

Imagine being a child at the dinner table with all the adult guests. You’re hungry, you reach for the breadbasket, and suddenly—“Don’t touch it!” your mother snaps, slapping your hand, or worse. What do you think that child would feel in their body the next time they reached out for something?

I was that child.

Now imagine if that child happens to be a kinesthetic, tactile learner. I learned to pull back, to contract, to shrink away from the outside world. After decades of living in that confined state, I realized I had to retrain my inner child. So, I took her to the zoo and the aquarium. I let her push every interactive button, touch everything that was allowed to be touched. For once, I gave her permission.

We interact with others and express our emotions using our hands. Hugging and holding of hands are physical expressions of affection. We lend a hand when somebody needs help. When we are safe, we are in good hands. We work together, hand in hand. We stay involved by keeping a hand in, even getting our hands dirty. But when we can’t act, our hands are tied, and the matter is out of our hands. Hands, in many ways, represent our life in action. 

We touch others with our hands, but have you ever thought about what information your hands are conveying? I used to be a teaching assistant for a body awareness class at an acting school. When the students were in odd numbers I would step in as a partner for pair exercises. Once I partnered with an attractive young man, and I gave him the assigned bodywork. Then we switched roles. The moment he touched me, I felt sorry for his girlfriend—or boyfriend. It was like being poked with an inanimate object, like a piece of wood. He wasn’t really there. Did my hands feel as inanimate to him as his did to me? I couldn’t help but wonder if he had never been touched properly by his family. What kind of childhood would leave a person so absent in their hands? 

I grew up in a family  where the sense of boundaries was unclear. I don’t remember my mother’s touch, except when I was sick. I experienced inappropriate touches from family members. Even so, I can be present in my hands. Being present in your hands is crucial for manual therapists—and for actors. Your hands tell a lot about you. 

When you’ve experienced inappropriate touches in early in life, you can become very sensitive to the intent behind others’ hands. Trust your feelings and quietly walk away. The other person might be unaware of their underlining intent, or it could just be your interpretation. Either way, what you felt is real. So walk away.

I once trained with a master of martial arts. He was also an energy healer with quite a following. After a year of training, one day he offered me hands-on healing session. He laid his hands on my upper chest. I had paid for sessions with him before and never felt threatened. He didn’t do anything inappropriate; he just laid hands on my chest. But unpleasant memory resurfaced. 

I thought about it for a while. Was it just my imagination? The master, this guru, was probably doing me a favor with this treatment, and I shouldn’t doubt his good intentions, right?  (I was younger then and perhaps more attractive than the older disciples.)  But then it hit me—this might be exactly what happened in those yoga guru sexual abuse incidents. I trusted my instincts and left the group. Otherwise, I would have allowed the past repeat itself, again and again. 

With a high concentration of nerve endings, your hands are both receivers and transmitters. Use them mindfully. In the anatomy lab I held the hand of a cadaver and contemplated what he might have touched, throughout his life—from birth to death. I wondered how he touched, how he navigated the world and how he interacted with others. Was his touch loving and caring? What was the last thing he touched before his death? What did he reach for, and what did he recoil from?  This hand held his child, caressed his lover, petted his dog, wiped tears, and waved goodbye…

The only time I saw the skin of a living human slip away was in a drawing depicting the aftermath of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. The skin of the hand slipped off like a glove, caught at nails, hanging from the fingertips. Otherwise, while not impossible, it’s very difficult to remove the skin of hands in one piece. The skin of the hands is intimately bonded.  

copyright 2025

Face Reflected

Posted on by Juno Üjiié

Sometimes, face, hands, and feet are left undissected for a longer time unless there is a dissector specifically interested in these areas. Novice dissectors often feel a strong hesitation to make incision on those structures. We tend to identify individuals by their faces, as it is the most public and social part of the body. It serves as the primary interface between “I” and the society. We can’t see our faces directly: what we see is merely a reflection in a mirror or an image captured by a camera at a particular moment. As a result, a person’s self-image does not always align with their physical face. 

When I went home for my father’s funeral, I found my junior high yearbook.  I recognized the faces of girls I hadn’t seen in decades; one by one, they came back to life in my memory. I knew those teenage girls; they looked exactly as I remembered. I turned pages looking for my photo, but I couldn’t find it.  I felt confused, being certain I was in the yearbook. I started over from the first page, and with each turn, the faces of the girls became clearer in my memory. Still I couldn’t find my own face. 

On the third try, I finally found my name under a photo. She was a beautiful teenage girl. I didn’t recognize her because I had been told I was an ugly, unattractive, miserable creature—an image I had come to believe due to the distorted reflections I had been shown. Did I look ugly to you, Dad?  Or did I threaten you?  Did I look ugly to you, Mom?  Or did you also believe what Dad saw? 

Anyway, it’s too late. I lost the chance to live the life of a pretty girl and became a plain looking high school student. When I remember my high school years, I see myself as that unpopular girl with long hair hiding half of her face, like Violet Parr in The Incredibles, believing that she is invisible. My best friend is that popular girl who dates the football team captain. Years later, I had the opportunity to attend a high school reunion. One guy—who was neither the football team captain nor an academic high achiever—told me that I had been his crush in high school. I was stunned.  “You were a beautiful and intelligent girl,” he said, “and I admired you.”  I didn’t know.  I knew he liked me, but I couldn’t believe that anyone would genuinely like me. So I missed the chance to live the life of a popular girl in high school. When surrounded by distorted mirrors, we come to believe the distorted images they reflect.  

Some people are desperate to modify their faces to match their self-image. Skin is often rubbed, massaged, moisturized, medicated, and painted. It is sometimes cut, stretched, peeled, threaded, paralyzed, and modified in various ways. The skin of face, in particular, receives the most attention. 

I often see older women in my neighborhood with skin stretched unnaturally, resembling a Japanese Noh mask. For those individuals, the skin is not an archive of their life’s history but rather a screen on which they project their fears about the future. They are desperately trying to reverse the time, even though their faces, frozen in a perpetual state of youth, no longer reflect who they truly are. 

The skin is continuous throughout the body, and you won’t find perforated lines to guide your cuts. You need to decide where to make an incision. Where does the face start? The skin on the face is quite thin, so you won’t see much subcutaneous adipose tissue. Instead you will find the parotid glands, which look like pads of fat, under ears. Working on it requires a meticulous attention. 

One facial expression muscle you might miss if you don’t know its location is the platysma. In many dissection workshops, it is mistakenly cut away along with subcutaneous adipose tissue. When I managed to save it from being partially cut away with the superficial fascia, I was fascinated. This extremely thin and broad muscle, which extends from the chin to the upper chest, resides between the sheets of subcutaneous adipose tissue. I can activate it and make it pop up. Despite being easy to miss during dissection, this muscle is not immune to modification: platysmaplasty, or neck lift, is a common procedure. 

Once the skin and superficial fascia are removed from the face, the cadaver looks less personal and more like an anatomy chart. 

copyright 2025

The story you tell about them might not be their real story

Posted on by Juno Üjiié

We were standing in the lab, looking at three cadavers on dissection tables. As workshop participants, we were to choose a body to work on.

One was a slender woman with unnaturally perky breasts. Her nails were impeccably manicured, her hair full and glossy. She was beautiful.

Another was a heavily boned woman with a muscular build. “She must have been an avid hiker,” someone said.

The third was a woman of significant size.

She looked exactly like a good friend I had—someone who suffered from psychological and mental health issues and who had steadily gained weight until she was nearly immobile.

I felt a pang of sadness when I saw her body on the dissection table, and I experienced a slight aversion to standing at her station. No, I didn’t want to dissect her. I already knew it would be physically harder to remove her superficial fascia.

And yet, somehow, I ended up at her table.

As I began releasing her from the bounds of skin, I couldn’t help but project. I imagined the subcutaneous adipose tissue as emotional baggage she had accumulated over a lifetime, or maybe as a thick armor she wore to shield her psyche from the outside world. Under the tremendous weight, it felt like she had been collapsing inward.

The layer of superficial fascia we freed from her dermis was sizable—just as she had been with her skin on. We began removing the adipose tissue, as if freeing her from the tortured existence of living in a large body. It was hard work. The layer was easily three inches thick in her midsection.

As I worked, I thought about all the nerve endings embedded in that adipose tissue. She probably had ten times more nerve length than I do. This was a hypersentient state of being.

And then, beneath the adipose, her muscular structure appeared—and we were all astounded.

What had been hidden under that armor of fascia was not a collapsed, atrophied frame. She was robust. I had never seen an elderly female cadaver with such powerful muscles. Her legs were so strong she looked like she could’ve squeezed the life out of a big, bad cowboy. Her gracilis was not slender at all; it was substantial. None of us had ever seen gracilis muscles like that.

Her musculature had supported the weight of her adipose armor. She had the body of an Amazon warrior. There was no trace of wasting. She must have remained mobile and active until quite recently, carrying her physical existence bravely.

Internally, too, she was robust.

Her organs were intact. No calcified arteries, no arteriosclerosis. Her colon was six feet long, padded with a healthy amount of visceral fat. No fatty liver. No damaged kidneys. No fibrosis in the uterus. Her heart was beautiful. Her lungs were slightly darkened, but free of adhesions.

She was healthy.
Much healthier than I am.

The slender, model-like woman, on the other hand, had gone through hell. Once her skin and minimal adipose were removed, her body appeared almost transparent. Cancer had riddled her form—metastatic, likely starting from the breast. A chemotherapy port protruded from her chest.

She was a fighter, too.

I find myself reflecting on my projections.

You can’t tell who someone is just by looking from the outside.
The story you tell about them might not be their real story.

Multiverse Madness

Posted on by SomatiCat

You may have heard the famous Eastern philosophical parable about a man who dreams he is a butterfly, only to awaken and wonder: is he a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man?

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness reminded me of that parable. In the film, dreams are portrayed as stories unfolding in alternate universes. Interestingly, the only person who can travel through the multiverse is the one who has never dreamed.

Have you ever had the same dream over and over? Not exactly the same, but different variations on a single theme? I used to have dreams like that.

One of the recurring dreams I had after a messy divorce was about my ex-husband. In those dreams, he had remarried and had a daughter and a son. They were some of my worst nightmares. He had cheated on me while I was undergoing infertility treatment, and by the time we divorced, I was too old to conceive. I had lost my chance to become a mother.

I dreamed this scenario again and again. The emotional anguish felt so real, it lingered even after I woke up. His betrayal stained the landscape of my inner world with grief and suffering. In waking life, I felt mostly anger—but underneath it, I carried a deep well of loss and sorrow.

In these dreams, I always lived in some kind of apartment. Each one felt strangely familiar. Sometimes I would find myself in the exact same apartment I had dreamed of before—with the same landscaping outside, the same scent in the air, the same humidity in the walls. I knew that place.

It’s been twenty-five years since the divorce, and I’ve finally stopped having that dream. Still, it feels as if I once lived in that apartment—in this life.

Then I began to wonder: maybe that was my life in an alternate universe. It’s about the inner choices we make—who we decide to become. Every decision spins off another timeline, another universe where a different version of you lives out the consequences of that choice.

If I had clung to the anger and suffering, maybe that nightmare would have been my reality.

These days, I rarely dream. Maybe my life has finally settled into this reality.

P.S. My ex-husband did remarry, but he never had kids. As for me, I’ve made peace with the fact that motherhood and I were probably never meant to be. Crisis averted—for the children.

Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead

Posted on by SomatiCat

I got a call from my 92-year-old mother. She had just been informed by the nursing home that my 100-year-old aunt passed away in her sleep—her heart had stopped.

I had visited her just a month ago and sat with her, talking. She had stopped responding a long time ago, but her heart kept beating with the help of a pacemaker. She swallowed whatever mushy food her caregiver spooned into her mouth and wore diapers.

This is not how I want to spend the last years of my life.

I loved her when I was a child. She lived next door to my parents, and she spoiled me with sweets, cute dresses, dolls, and stuffed animals—whatever I wanted, she bought for me. Every day, I waited eagerly for her to come home and ran to give her a hug. Sometimes, her breath smelled of alcohol.

My father was emotionally abusive, and my mother was emotionally unavailable. In many ways, it was my single, childless, career-oriented aunt who “adopted” me. She even wanted to adopt me legally at one point, but my parents—outraged—refused. There was no reason for them to give me up; we weren’t poor. I suppose it was her desire to have a daughter of her own.

I used to say I wanted to be just like her. She was my role model: fashionable, independent, capable of doing anything perfectly. She was the first woman in the region to be promoted to regional manager at the national telephone company. She was also incredibly skilled with her hands—especially knitting and crocheting. I had so many beautiful sweaters she made, and people often complimented them.

I, on the other hand, am not crafty at all. I tried, but I could never do anything as well as she could. I’d get frustrated, give up, and she would finish my projects for me. I still sometimes try, but I almost always give up.

She kept her home neat and beautiful, always with fresh flowers from her garden. She adorned the house with lovely things. Though she didn’t cook elaborate meals, she arranged simple dishes with such care that they looked more appealing than my mother’s “here’s your food, eat” style.

I admired her and, as a little girl, I dreamed of being like her—working, unmarried, and childless. That was an unusual dream at the time, when most girls wanted to be brides in white gowns. My parents didn’t respond to my dream at all. They just ignored it.

Life didn’t turn out quite the way I envisioned. I moved to the U.S., got married, worked as an ordinary office assistant, got divorced, lost my job, became an independent contractor, and remained childless. Still, I returned to Japan once a year to visit my parents and my aunt.

Even as a child, I sensed something was off in my family. There was a ghost in the closet—a family secret. Children can feel these things. Even if it’s never spoken, it changes the air.

The closet opened after my father—my aunt’s younger brother—passed away at age 87. My mother began to talk.

It was the scandal everyone in the small town knew. My aunt had an affair with her married boss and got pregnant. At the time, having a child out of wedlock was a deep shame for a respectable family. But she refused to have an abortion. Her lover’s wife was infertile, and my aunt may have believed that having a child would lead him to divorce and marry her.

Instead, he and his wife adopted the baby girl. He secretly allowed my aunt to visit the child, pretending she was just a family friend. But my aunt, lacking boundaries, acted like a mother. As the child grew older and started asking questions, the visits ended. The wife eventually died, but the man never remarried. The girl grew up not knowing she was adopted until her teenage years.

Then I was born into the family. At the time, my parents lived with my grandmother and my aunt. In a sense, my grandmother gave me to my aunt as a substitute. I don’t remember my mother’s touch. I was always with my aunt. Four years later, my brother was born, and this time my mother clung tightly to him. He was always wrapped around her like a baby monkey.

Once the secret came out, the meaning of so many things shifted. When I used to say I wanted to be like my aunt, I meant I wanted to be an independent woman. But my parents may have heard something else—that I admired her for having an affair and bearing a child out of wedlock, bringing shame to the family. My father resented having a daughter—specifically me being a daughter. From him, I absorbed the belief that all men were predators, and I had to fend them off with claws and fangs.

My aunt loved me like a daughter until she lost her mind. Even in my fifties, she’d try to brush my hair and spoon-feed me. She never truly saw me for who I was—only the daughter she lost. I was her living doll.

After my father died, my aunt’s physical and mental health declined. No one in the family wanted to take care of her, and I was the only one who didn’t hate her. So, by default, I became the one responsible.

She lived in her own home for nearly ten years, with various caregivers as her condition worsened. Eventually, she needed 24-hour care.

That’s when her true nature came out. She was highly narcissistic and very demanding. She wanted everyone around her to serve her in exactly the way she expected. She went through so many caregivers. She never forgot who had crossed her.

“Everyone who spoke ill of me died of cancer,” she once said, as if she’d cursed them.

Yes, she cursed me with her projection. She cast me in a role she needed someone to play—and I played it well. I understand she had a hard life, and she endured it the only way she knew how: by casting her pain outward, cursing everyone around her.

After the phone call, I said to myself, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

At least I’ve chosen not to curse anyone. That is my freedom.

Dead and Naked

Posted on by SomatiCat

At Fort Lauderdale Airport, there was a long line for baggage check-in and security screening. As a hub for cruise travelers, the airport gets especially busy at certain times of the day. I stood in line for over an hour.

Airport staff maneuvered wheelchair-bound passengers through the crowd, one after another, weaving between the lines. Most of the people waiting were elderly—older than me, likely returning home from their first or perhaps their last cruise.

A month ago, I lost my 13-year-old dog. Since then, every time I see someone walking a dog, I’m struck by a strange feeling—a bittersweet sadness, like a drop of water hitting the surface of a lake, sending ripples outward until they fade into the distance. The pain of loss is universal, something we all share. Every person here will, at some point, feel what I feel now—the grief of losing a beloved companion.

I looked around and imagined cadavers on dissection tables, standing in line now—dead and naked. Sooner or later, we all end up there, in one way or another. We share the same destination. I am among them.

Is that a relief? Perhaps. At the very least, the vision freed me, if only for a moment, from the vulnerability of being.