I Am Not Achilles

A searing memoir about what it means to live in a body that is always being evaluated, by ourselves and others—and the impossible quest for normality

Emil Sands grew up learning to manage a body that is deemed unruly. Born with cerebral palsy, he is taught—by doctors, his parents, and eventually himself—how to correct and conceal his body in a pursuit of normality. But as a young teen, Emil stood before a marble statue from the ancient world—one depicting an ideal body—and, much to his shock, recognized himself. Sculpted in contrapposto, this perfect spear-bearer carries his weight entirely on his right leg, just as Emil’s cerebral palsy causes him to carry his weight on his strong side, while the other drags behind. From this moment, the classic ideal of beauty becomes both a mirror and a painful reminder: something to aspire to, and something that will forever exclude him.

Emil grows up learning to pass—to disguise his imbalances, police his own sense of difference, and control how others see him. As physical therapy, surgery, and his own self-scrutiny reshape his body, a deeper question emerges: What does it mean to live in a body that is always being evaluated—by others and by ourselves? What are the stakes of this when ability and disability underwrite some of the oldest, and most unforgiving, distinctions of our society—virtuous or wicked, success or failure, beautiful or ugly?

Moving between the author’s own story and the art of the ancient world, I Am Not Achilles interrogates the relationship between beauty, ability, and worth. In the gym, on first dates, in locker rooms, and in tangled bedsheets, Emil measures himself against potent unspoken ideals, born millennia ago and transmitted via the perfect symmetry of the sculptures of antiquity, the heroic feats of classical heroes, and the moral goodness that it is attached to having a perfect body. In this searingly honest examination of what it means to be embodied, what begins as a desire to fix, or transcend, the body becomes a deeper reckoning with what it means to live in a body that is always being evaluated, and the ceaseless and incomplete labor of learning to see ourselves differently.