“I Have to Tell You Something I Don’t Want to Tell You…"

So what about my new “positive outlook”?

“I have to tell you something I don’t want to tell you…

….so I’m almost tempted to not tell you because I just don’t want to say it outloud, for my own sake,” I said to my husband, as I FaceTimed him that night because he was out of town for the week: “I just don’t want to say it because then it’s real.”

I had spent one week at dance camp recently and I felt like the world had magic and music in it again. I remembered all the little silly things that make me feel like I have something to offer beyond just a high pain tolerance and an ability to not yelp during frequent EMGs.

Lately, I’ve been realizing that propping me up on the table like a mannequin (or a Ben Folds lyric) isn’t going to sustain this level of pain I have to keep existing through. It just isn’t.

“I’m definitely trying to fight for my ‘purpose’ that’s beyond motherhood. Though that provides purpose but, as you know, eventually, they leave the nest. So … what keeps me pushing through all this pain after?” I text a friend recently, who is a fellow parent and could understand the cross-roads. “And then for me it’s like ‘and how do I mentally stay alive as a person when there is this pain cloud, and I get punished whenever I do anything fun’?”

That is not drama, either (though I love drama).

If I dance… I suffer for a week. If I type… I suffer for days. If I take a bath… I suffer for days. If I drive a car… I suffer for a day. And most of these things add up to what we see now: “You need your neck discs replaced” [Pretends she doesn’t look down at her computer all the time]. “You need your pelvis and lower back stabilized.” [Pretends she doesn’t drama-breathe to contemporary music for a living]

And even when I took almost half-a-year to recover “properly” after my winter double-surgery the way I’ve been told I should all this time… It didn’t heal faster, do better. In fact. I was often way more depressed (and often very profoundly alone).

One option had community, and music, and catharsis… And one was being in pain in more than one way.

Teaching dance again lately, I remember all the reasons I used to travel the world to do so, called it my life. Gleeful ways to make super little ones fall in love with dance even if they throw a tantrum on the first day because they don’t want to be there. I recall the lineage passed down to me by teachers greater than I - my mentor, my sister. I feel laughter like a thick blanket in the air, and want to wrap my weary bones in it as if the Society of Snow.

But…. there is a cost.

An enormous one.

“I have to tell you something I don’t want to tell you…” I said.

“Say it” he said (cue ‘You Don’t Know Me’, the same Ben Folds song)

And then I did…….

Part Two. More Tomorrow.

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