Reconciling an Athlete's Body

My body doesn't do what I want it to do anymore.

And sometimes that physical frustration bleeds into an emotional frustration. All of my formative years and a large part of my adult years, I had complete control over my physical being. I could bend, stretch, wrap and move. Effortless and fluid and poetic and strength and lightness and joy. My knees and hips and ankles did whatever I tasked them to do.

But sometime in my mid-twenties, my joints stopped responding to my every command. Instead, I was met with resistance. And awkwardness. And weird noises. And yes...pain. My body felt foreign to me. I'd watch myself in the mirror of a dance studio and see something alien. Not me. Not my movement. Not my ankles. Not my knees. Not my flexibility.

Years of injuries and a diagnosis of 'pre-arthritis' (whatever that means) took it all away. Right from under me.

Any long-term athlete will tell you what years and days and hours and minutes of practice will do to a body. It strengthens and weakens. It lifts and tears. It responds and resists. And years later, it stops. Like a cold rubber-band, everything tightens and constricts and seizes.

So I went from ballerina to runner. Because I had to do something. I had to know that my legs could go. And do. And keep going and doing. An athlete is always an athlete and the body is the vessel.

And then the running stopped. Three knee injuries and some major health problems (that I've written about here) forced me to (literally) slow down. The state of my body had become a perfectionist's worst nightmare - inability to complete a task that I had practically mastered.

So, yes... I get really down on myself because I can't run long distances anymore. And I can't stand on my toes or throw my leg over my head. But then I remind myself that I have run hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles over the last 5 years. I have danced a million dances on a million stages under a million bright, starry lights. I have crossed finish lines to a cheering crowd and had roses thrown at my feet after a 3 hour performance. My knees and ankles are muscularly destroyed, but have put up with a lot of punishment and continue to hold up my body. My hips, after a lifetime of rotating unnaturally from ballet, have slowly deteriorated into rusty cogs, aching every morning and sometimes waking me up at night. Sitting hurts just as bad as standing, which is just as bad as laying. And sometimes my legs go numb. But I'm still here. And I'm still trying.

I'm extremely lucky. 

Grace and the Dark Days

I, like most, can split my life up into phases. Clusters of years; different versions of me. And I used to be ashamed of certain periods of my life. But that shame is ushered in by confusion, and gracefully swept out by patience and the knowledge that I've done better since.

Time mercifully brings transparency. I am so stupidly humbled by what my life has brought me over the last handful of years. A healthy mind, a healing body, a divine love and a family. Right under my nose, I sprouted a huge net of beautiful, loving people.

Damn, that's an honor.

So, thankfully, I can ruminate on the ghost of decisions past and forgive myself for being blinded by pain and desperation.

Love will do that to you.

Almost a year ago, I had someone reach out to me via Facebook. And this person was such a beacon of everything that went wrong in the dark days. He was the catalyst and the ringleader of a multitude of bad things. Chaos and dramatics hung around him in a hazy smog and everyone within his radius was touched by it. We were all pretending to be happy in this dizzy, fast life of debauchery and whiskey that he evoked.

The version of me that existed in those days was so terribly sad and angry. I was desperately running... no, sprinting... away from my past and jumping on any train that took away the compounded years of abandonment, abuse and rejection. An exhausted shell. And for some odd reason, that's when the leeches come out to help you waste away. And so this person, and his band of merry fools, brought me under their bone-picked wings.

That is what happens to the lost ones.

But this post isn't about the Facebook message and what was said. It's about grace. And how it pulls you out of the obscurity and into the light. And holds you there until your legs are strong underneath you and you remember what it feels like to have hope. Grace is abundant and does not discriminate. It gives you life. And light. And love. And it doesn't. ever. stop.

Grace just is.

Sweeps out the bad.

Calls home the good.

And tells you that you are worthy of more.

On Pain

I do pain pretty well.

That is to say, I can write about pain very succinctly and very easily. And I used to think that that was weird. Or that I was weird. Or that I needed a psychiatrist.

As it turns out, all of those things are true... but the words are my therapy. The bad memories are sharp and when they're at their darkest, they can be unbearable. But then I sit and type and breathe and think and before I'm done, I'm lighter. The room is lighter and I'm lighter and the weight that can anchor my heart has been pulled up and in.

The hard stuff is the stuff that matters. That's what my friends keep telling me. And I know they're telling me the truth because that's what they do. So I sit and let the wounds have their time with words. And it's a sacred healing to have them laid out in that way.

That's why I do write about pain. I'm far enough away from it to look at it objectively. And I know that timing is terribly beautiful.

That's why I can write about pain.

It's yours and mine and universal. I say what you say. Sometimes out loud and sometimes internally, but always written out. And that's when I know I'm not so weird.

As long as we're talking about it...

There's a lot in the news right now about domestic violence. I'm not going to comment on the details, but it's safe to say that what is being brought to light is all too common.

I'm not going to spout statistics.

I'm not going to talk about the perpetrators.

But I am going to talk about what I know.

This is an uncomfortable post to write. Not because I am uncomfortable to write it, but because I know you'll be uncomfortable to read it. But it may offer a glimpse into why.

All the why's you are asking have an unfortunate answer.

I stayed, at 21, because I was alone. And terrified. I was isolated from my family and all of my friends. And I know you want to know - because they always want to know - how does one become isolated?

Systematically.

One by one, my ties to the world outside of my apartment were checked off of a list. And I was slowly and all-at-once alone. Tethered to my tiny, 700 square foot world. I talked to no one. Isolation and shame work that way. They are constant reminders that you aren't doing right by yourself. I was incredibly ashamed of what I had allowed to happen, and what I had become.

And the days ran together. The fear ran together. The threats of death became monotonous.

Isn't that scary? When even the threat of your life being thrown off of a cliff, careening down a ravine in a car, becomes old news?

Isn't it terrible that the name calling becomes so routine, that the words don't matter anymore?

The control was all I knew. What to wear. How to do my hair. How to do my makeup. Where to walk. Where to look.

I stayed like this, terror-filled and numb all the same, for over a year.

And then the fear of being killed took second priority over survival. It was the last battle. I had my arm slammed in a door, and my wrist twisted up and inside, behind my back... and even in all the blinding pain, and fear that my shoulder would tear out of the socket, I knew I had to fight for myself. More immediately, that I had to get to the phone before he ripped it out of the wall. And that's how I fought my way out. Scraping and scrambling, hair being torn out and forcing myself back up from being body-slammed, all guts and raging life to get. to. the. phone.

And I did.

So that's why.

It's never easy. And there is always more to every story.

(Not the movie)

Her.

I have a few 'hers' in my life, but none more important than a handful of all-stars. And in that handful, these two:

Now that's a perfectly ironic word to use, isn't it? Handful. Ha.

I am simultaneously spilling over with love and adjectives for these two, while not being able to come up with any that do either of them justice.

But I'll tell you what I do know.

I know that these two love me.

Like, really love the really-real me. Which is sometimes hard to believe. Because sometimes, I don't feel whole and deserving. But when these two wildfires-in-a-can are swirling about, I can't help but feel normal. And maybe we're all just a little to the left of normal, but that's what makes it feel right. Right?

The night that this picture was taken was like jumping in an ice bath after a sauna. I felt baptized. And complete. Like my soul got a battery recharge and I was ready to face the world again.

I used to think that one was a tree, strong and steady. And other was a bird, flight and fancy. And they are both those things, but mostly, they are rocks. Strong, sturdy, everlasting...all rough edges and smooth slopes, skipping on life's ocean.

I can't say enough about her. Or her.

But that's it for now.

Sometimes

Sometimes, when you write, nothing comes out the way you want it to and somewhere your voice gets lost. It gets stuck in the muck and muddle of all the words and thoughts and digging it out is damn near impossible.

And sometimes you can't quit obsessing over a grammatical error. A really simple one that really just niggles and irks you and takes up rest in your brain.

And sometimes you just don't think it's good enough. Getting it out wasn't enough because it isn't accurate and doesn't sound like you or what you intended on saying.

And sometimes it's really hard, but the difficult stuff is the good stuff and the stuff that people need to read and relate to and that's all that keeps you typing away. Even when you don't like what you read because it's too raw and real and it doesn't feel quite right traveling from your brain to your fingertips, like you're telling a secret on yourself.

Sometimes it doesn't feel like enough. And it also feels like too much.

And that's when I look at pictures of my husband. And Meg. Because dogs are cool. And my husband is the whole world.

Family Tree

I've been talking a lot about family lately.

What does family mean to you?

Now that we're all adults, having survived adolescence and the hurdles of young-adulthood (whatever that brand of chaos happened to be), I think it's fair to assume that most, if not all of you know who your family is. And, I think it is equally fair to say that you know what I mean by family. Because, you see, there's family...and then there's family.

Mine has found me piece by piece, and formed itself above, below and around me, beyond my control. All these wonderful people, buzzing about, forming patterns and hives around my head, have all landed squarely in front of me and claimed me as their own.

And I'm so stupidly lucky.

A long(ish) time ago, I wrote something about family trees. And I said that if a family were a tree, then I had always felt like a lone little leaf, floating on the wind, swinging back and forth toward the ground; only briefly a part of the tree, yet not fully landed either.

Well.

As it turns out, life gives you abundant trees if you know where to look. And it's hard not to look in the right places when trees are springing out of the ground practically underneath you as you walk.

And sometimes, a really big tree will show up on the horizon. And it'll have a deep and strong root system. And a beautiful canopy of leaves and shade and love and twirling wind. And it'll catch you, the lone leaf on the breeze, and set you down on one of the branches. And there you'll be.

This is M2.


















She's my mother-in-law, but I hate that term because to me, it's a verbal eye-roll... 'She's my mother IN LAW. Like, we're not REALLY related..' So, I've named her Mom 2. Or, M2 for short.

She's my tree.

























And she has the best laugh in the entire world. I'd bet on it.