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I had every intention of sitting down — well, lying down — this week to write an update to last week’s post about my recent back flair. But then, by some weird coincidence, I stumbled on this piece I wrote in the early days of this newsletter, in December 2019, about the odd, new pain I was in then. I wrote it from a house down the street from my sister’s, where we were staying with my parents for a week over the holidays. It was sunny and crisp every day, we had the most delicious dinners every night, and other people took my child to do things during the day, and I spent most of the week in sweatpants, struggling to get around, rolling on different-sized balls on the floor, trying to sit and lie in various positions. None of it helped.
A month later I finally found my enormously gifted physical therapist who — right before we all went on lockdown — set me on the path that got me to…today. When I think of the great good fortune I had of finally getting into see her twice in February 2020 — of what might have become of me if my first appointment was set for March — I shutter.
One of the scariest moments when you’ve lived with any chronic condition is when the person you’ve grown to rely on for help and support and knowledge tells you they aren’t sure what’s happening, maybe scans are needed, or a referral. To be set off in the wild again is what nobody wants. The wild is not a safe place.
This is what happened last week — my PT said, maybe some scans would just give us more info? I immediately sobbed in her office, but I was reminded that this isn’t necessarily reason for catastrophizing. In the weeks before I wrote the piece below, my beloved acupuncturist — who’d mostly kept me out of pain for a few years but was now coming to the limits of our work — had said the same thing. There’s something I’m missing. Get an MRI and let’s see. The MRI revealed, my PT would later tell me, that I had a “beautiful scan.” Given all I’d put my body through, this felt like such a gift. My beautiful scan! Ha! (And these ones, too, were fine! Woohoo!)
Over the weekend — now we’re back to this weekend — in another session of endless rolling on various tennis balls in front of The Crown (so bad?!), I figured out, I think, that this particular problem has its origins in a new spot — my thoracic, for you body people, where ribs attach, not my lumbar — and if I get in there for long enough, get those tennis balls to ease up the musculature, something settles down. It is nice, making these discoveries. Well, not nice, exactly, but it calms my panic a little, even if it doesn’t immediately solve the problem. It feels like I’m not entirely a stranger to myself.
It does, however, remind us that the body is an endless project. Our endless project. Things improve, they fall apart, they improve again, something else falls apart. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. For me — as I think it is for many of us who’ve been through the ringer with our minds and bodies, with our health in any way — it is really a mental game. Can I get through this without building an entire empire of doom in my mind?
This, in some ways, is why I came back to, and want to share, the piece below. There it was! Proof of a time when I was really deep in it, scared and lost and in the dark, and I now know with total certainty that I found my way out of it eventually.
I’ve been having issues with my back recently — what’s new — but this latest round of pain has been a frustrating mystery. I get up from lying down or sitting and can't stand up properly. I literally can’t fully unfold, I’m hunched over like a caricature of an old man. A bunch of steps in, I can sort of move again, but it’s tenuous and far from fluid. Nothing I do seems to work for any extended period of time: swimming, yoga, acupuncture, walks, baths, Tylenol, anti-inflammatories, even valium. I try not to freak out about these things; I’ve been around the block with this so many times, I know the territory well, the body shifts, etc., but when nothing seems to budge for months on end, I start to worry, and the worry only tightens my muscles and my thinking and the whole thing is a pretty awful cycle.
Luckily, I’ve learned over the years to have a lot of hands on deck, so last week I ended up speaking or working with people who took a look at me with totally fresh eyes and were able to say: see how you’re leaning into your right side? See how you’re protecting the left? It doesn’t need protection anymore. See how high your right shoulder is, creeping up toward your ear? See how your left hip is hiking up?
Finding a smart, curious bodyworker is worth your money in gold (truly, they are lifelines), but there’s something inherently satisfying about doing the work yourself, with someone else’s voice guiding you — moving a sitting bone slightly under, shifting the weight to the inside of your feet, dropping that right shoulder down. Learning to inhabit your body differently, yet again.
This is where I lived for decades, inside these moments of self-discovery in my own body on my yoga mat, and I relished it, those minuscule and yet monumental shifts. But when you are injured, a disconnect can happen, what works no longer does. You feel disempowered and hopeless, and something is severed, the pathway that could fix things, the pathway that could reassure, understand, realign, regroup is flooded with doubt. This morning when I woke up with my entire lumbar fused (?) and I was unable to do anything but shuffle for a good half hour and started sobbing to my husband in the kitchen, I just wanted someone to swoop in and save me.
One of the yoga teachers I worked with this week said to me: Your body is doing you a favor. It won’t move until you start doing it properly. This is a gift. I am not much for that kind of language (I hate thinking of pain as a gift, although I know it can be, bringing with it so many important messages — I HEAR YOU!), but I was grateful for what she was saying, which was: You can and will relearn to be in your body, and it will be stronger than ever because it will be aligned. Use this as that opening.
You’ve compensated your way out of compensations, another said to me, your lumbar spine won’t move anymore, and I thought of a maze where more and more exits become dead ends but you need to get out so you forge new pathways, cutting corners, ducking under things. Eventually you get stuck inside the maze and need to regroup to find the clear way through. That’s where I am. Breathing, looking around. Which way to turn? It must be somewhere, in all my searching, I've never looked before.
Another teacher of mine said, very strongly: this isn’t your fault. You’ve used the teachings you've learned and they served you for a time and aren’t serving you anymore, so you are on the hunt for something else. That’s the organic process here. I know she’s right. But it does beg the question: how many times can your own body become alien to you? How many times do we need to meet again? To say, okay, I’m listening? What do you need? How should I move? What’s changed? To tune in so completely that you can hear at this new frequency.
When I was on my hands and knees, this new teacher talking me through the most gentle cat/cow in the world, she said, “This is going to be very humbling for you, to really go back to basics.” I couldn't help but think of old, reliable Pema Chödrön in this situation: “This is the discovery of egolessness. It’s when all our usual schemes fall apart. Reaching our limit is like finding a doorway to sanity and the unconditional goodness of humanity, rather than meeting an obstacle or a punishment.”
This is not a punishment. It’s a doorway to sanity.
This is not a punishment. It’s a doorway to sanity.
Now, this is a mantra to live by, isn’t it?
Sending love,
Abs xo
SO FEW THINGS Michelle Obama’s book is out today and yes I’m gonna read it. Also so excited about the newest Smitten Kitchen cookbook and Claire Saffitz’s latest. Has anyone read this and want to report back? I generally feel very anxious about lists like this but I have enjoyed a lot of the ones on this list. I fucking love Ina. Write letters and make calls for Senator Warnock in Georgia.