by brane zalar
Writing for writing sake. I’m back at it. It’s the little whisper that won’t go away, and after some deeply healing time, I want to carve out some space for this desire of mine.
I think it was in a podcast episode of Armchair Expert with Adam Scott, where Dax Shepard and Adam were saying that writing is so so hard and so painful…like committing to doing homework just for fun… but that freeing themselves up to produce something that wasn’t even good, just for the sake of writing to get something down on paper… it struck home with me again. Once more I am going to attempt this. Daily writing, not to be seen by anyone, freedom to be crummy, and maybe see if one day I can cull something meaningful from this heap of words flowing out of my brain through my fingers for the potential betterment of myself and others.
Listening today to Glennon Doyle on her podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, interview Susan Cain, author of Bittersweet, something struck me and was actually the stir for me to get things down once again. Susan was talking about how this universal sense of melancholy (found in minor note music, sad songs, rainy days), some feeling it more strongly than others, this longing for a truer more beautiful existence in this deeply imperfect world, is so important and shouldn’t necessarily be stamped out, as it so often is in our society today. Happy = good. Sad = bad. But she was saying that each one of us on this planet has lovely and challenging things that happen to us in this imperfect world. In response, specifically to these challenging things, we each have a choice to make. We can choose to not process these events, unconsciously going through the motions, projecting that hurt onto others and carrying on the generational tradition or pattern of pain or heartbreak (in the form of addiction, abuse, neglect, criticism, etc). Or, we can choose to look at these hard things through different lenses, feel the feelings connected to the hurt, and create something true and beautiful and helpful for others to connect to and learn from. Art, song, the written word. This is precisely why I began writing in the first place and what I do earnestly dream to renew… sharing my own hard things with the hope that we don’t all have to feel alone.
A week ago today, I injured my back. This is the third time I’ve felt such pain. The first, was early 2010. I was a few months post partum with my second of four children was born. (For those birth story fans, my first child, in frank breach position, was delivered via C-Section. My second child was my first natural labor with an epidural for VBAC delivery with complications… my labor failed to progress, and the Foley Bulb “indicator light” that my cervix was dilating failed when it became lodged between my sons skull and my pelvis when my water broke leading me to believe I was not as far along as I actually was….leading me to doubt my body and opt for an epidural as I misjudged my 9cm pain for less than 3cm pain. Also, during which I had a post-partum hemorrhage, and tore so badly and popped the stitches on Christmas Eve, requiring me to return for debridements [aka rubbing the torn tissue with gauze to re-bleed and re-heal the most sensitive tissue on the body]). This meant that I could not sit for months and required pain medication to simply exist with a toddler and an infant. During that time, I was changing my son’s diaper (at a brand new friends house, first time ever meeting this newly formed playgroup of mothers of two children in San Francisco) and I heard a pop and hit the floor, leaving this new friend’s house on a stretcher in an ambulance leaving my baby with this squad of unknown women to be picked up by my husband). Wild.
The second time this back pain occurred was in mid-2015, when I was post-partum with my fourth, my third natural VBAC, also with complications during which my fetal daughter’s heart rate was slowing as there was too little amniotic fluid so there was cord compression requiring them to place a tube up into my contracting uterus, and fill it back up with saline, pushing against this muscular organ that is pushing with the might of a species, born millennia ago and with the fervor of a thousand suns, thus required to bring life into this world…. Ultimately allowing our bookend girl to enter our family safely. Phew. A few months later, I was doing the dishes, this time at our home in New Jersey, and I heard a pop and again, I hit the floor.
And finally, this most recent episode, I am now 42 years old, with these babies now ranging in age from 14 down to 7 years old, busy, strong, hurt but healing and whole, fit, present, steady… and I reached into the dishwasher to add one last dish before heading out the door… and once more, I hit the floor. Not one ounce of a hint that something was even the slightest bit precarious with my back. No pain, no twinge, no nothing. This time, I could not stand for several minutes until I could muster enough strength to get my right leg beneath me. With my son’s assistance, I rose. But once standing, my back muscles were spasming so that I could not weight shift to walk. It took 20 minutes to walk 10 feet.
This set into motion a series of appointments: chiropractor, PCP, X-rays, physiatrist, physical therapy. All requiring a ride to and from kind friends and family, and sometimes a person to lean on as I worked to contort my body into the passenger seat of a car (far more difficult than it sounds when your back is almost continually in spasm and the slightest deviation from the non-spasming space brings you to your knees). I knew it was bad when I was making my way toward the elevator at our nearby UPenn medical campus, and was passed by a jolly 80-something couple who shuffled right on past as I hobbled along stiffly, balancing the weight of my torso with my hands on my thighs, asking if they would mind holding the elevator.
I was sleeping 12-14 hours a day. Muscle relaxers, benzos, steroids. I needed maximum assistance from my husband to get into and out of bed. I also needed his help to shower and get dressed. He would hand me whatever pills were needed at whatever time they were needed. My house swirled once again, like in 2018 when I was down for the count for the better part of a year (with a difficult to diagnose, Mirena IUD birth control-induced intracranial hypertension and subsequent inability to wean from prednisone and adrenal gland crash) …. During that time, our home was full of laughter and merriment… but with dishes and laundry undone. Floors unswept. Beds unmade. Counters not wiped. You see, my husband is the fun one. He can sail you through a crisis deftly and confidently and with a deeply grounded feeling of total safety, while also stopping for ice cream and staying up a little late. I’m more the rule-abiding kind. The tidy one. Who prefers things in its place and can get a lil persnickety if the pillows are tumbled willy nilly on the couch and rooms are left in chaos. Not all the time. Just some of the time. We both need the other to balance the other out… but on Friday evening, around 5pm… I was awakened from a groggy, heavy, medicated sleep… to the sound of joyful children laughing. Splashing. Music. I heard mens voices interspersed with chuckles and the cocktail shaker mingling ice with spirits to be poured out and savored. I was confused. We had just opened our pool. We hadn’t yet had the inaugural swim. It was still April, after all. Normally, each year, I take a picture of all 4 kids jumping into the pool for the first time. Now, it had already happened. The reason I had only heard men’s voices was because it was my friends 40th birthday party and all my girlfriends were there so it was the men, children, and infirm who were left behind. And that was me. Again. Just like it had been all those many months before, back in 2018. And yet, here I laid. In the same bed. With the same fan clicking overhead, the sound sometimes the only thing reminding me I was still alive. All sorts of feelings flung me right back to that dark place, emotionally healed though I now am. Or thought I was. It was dizzying. I creaked out of bed, plodded over to the window and threw up the curtain and saw just the picture of joy strewn out ahead of me… and me on the other side of the window once again. In pain. Curly hair all-a-tangle, pajamas swerved and hugging my body at odd angles. All in one moment, I saw red (ranging from the ill-placed blame of, how could my husband do this to me? How could he rob this moment from me?) and I internally crumbled into a puddle of self-pity (why does this keep happening to me? What have I done to deserve this?) It all felt so familiar and it was so deeply unwelcome in my soul. It brought up so much from that time… who was here, who now is not. What life felt like missing so much and not even being well enough to realize.
I was training to run a 10 mile race four days after I became injured, in the immediate aftermath, still delusionally believing I could still do the race. That was cancelled. Everything was cancelled. The puppeteering of rides to practices and games and tryouts and CCD and and and… began. Again. Meals were delivered and life was put on hold. Again.
But I’ve come around to remind myself that this experience is not that. I will improve. I am strong. I can handle this. Herniated discs happen every day and all the time and I can work to heal myself. But it did strike me… that even when we have put in the effort to heal and process and let go… sometimes, when things sneak past our control, we still have unhealed bits that show themselves. It’s so hard to recognize in the moment. Especially when you’re experiencing physical pain, but sometimes it comes in moments when you’re out of pain and with a clear mind that you can see it. There is always more work to be done. And…. The triggers will always be there. And the memories will always remain. The control was never in our hands to begin with. And all we can own is our reaction and a heaping spoonful of gratitude for whatever it is we do have.
At one of my many appointments (with a hand surgeon for a finger issue I have randomly had and happened to have an appointment I couldn’t cancel in the midst of this), I was given a God-wink. The provider was similar in age to me and the brother of a colleague of my husband. He and I had never met but he provided great counsel and as we were saying our goodbyes, I gingerly and stiffly rose from my chair. I offered awkwardly that I had just thrown my back out to explain my slowness. He said “oh yeah, me too! I have my back brace on now.” “Me too!” I replied. And there, we shared the hows and when’s and why’s and tips and tricks and struggles and woes. “I workout every day and this is so frustrating!” “I know!! Same!!” It felt so so deeply steadying in the midst of this familiar frenetic time. We never want to be a part of sometimes the difficult “clubs “we sometimes find ourselves in (the cancer club, the no-parents club, the IVF club, the addictions club, etc). But as a family member pointed out, who was recently diagnosed with a progressive neuromuscular disorder shared, it stinks to be in the club… but if you have to be there, it’s the best thing to have. That shared knowledge of that particular brand of struggle. The “me too” moments. The little things that would largely go unnoticed by someone who simply doesn’t understand.
So when I heard Susan Cain and Glennon Doyle sharing that we all have a choice when faced with the hard…. And that when hard things happen we can *choose* to either let them pass or process them and turn them into something true and beautiful that can help someone somewhere be seen, I remembered. Yes. That, please. Susan also said that she has forever been in awe at the state of communion an author and a reader can share, even when thousands of years and thousands of miles separate one from the other. The power of connection is everything. And today it was the push I needed to put pen to paper and write. My hard is not your hard. But maybe you can see parts of your story in mine and maybe something will remind you of something hard in your own life. Your triggers. Your difficult something. Life is a wild twirl of sanguine and melancholy. Whether or not you choose to dance with one, the other, or both, is up to you. ❤️
Care to share your thoughts?