I Stretch… and It Pops a Bone or Two

We can’t fathom the steps it takes for butterfly to dive to the bell

I start the day by wondering if I could start this writing using just my voice.

Like a Diving Bell with a Butterfly, I continue to find limitations in being able to write physically … yet my muscle memory is so finally tuned to typing, that it feels as if the very motion connects my mind to the keyboard; A wire that can’t be cut.

On this day, I am facing a left hand that’s throbbing from a deep, central nerve pain - making thumbing along on my phone feel near impossible (which is the primary verb of every single moment in our society right now and without it we are constantly reminded of how much we are failing people by those new, very ableistically labeled standards- “Why don’t you reply back fast enough?”)… My wrist like a toothache, sawing away in the wrong space.

I find it tragic how swiftly our cultural connotations have created new hoops for hurting bodies to hop through; something that only those with good fortune and low pain are able to call to others’ faultily fragile attention.

“You didn’t reply to me,” a dear friend will say, “But I saw you posting online not long after.”

I think about having the gall (or even cruelty) to intentionally ignore anyone in my life (something that has never been a skill of mine, even if I tried)… and come up with an empty notepad.

I copy and paste pre-written paragraphs with shaking hands and throbbing thimbles - feeling the opposite of a symbol of someone who can live life as it’s defined now (= almost entirely online) in “real time”, instead of perpetually falling behind as an “after the fact” itemization of a person.

My life is one large “copy and paste” masquerading as something with much more ability. But that’s hard for anyone to see when all we see is what we see through a screen.

We can’t fathom the steps it takes for butterfly to dive to the bell… How some of us wish we could blink twice to Control and C…. How some of us just can’t keep up and never will.

I never will.

(But that’s rarely understood.)

On this morning, I’m thinking about how I read a Vogue series called “5 to 9” at practically 5 AM (I’m being dramatic) because I love almost anything that has to do with the embryonic everything’s of someone’s everyday.

I don’t need that “someone“ to be what we call a “celebrity” in order to find their daily habitations and situations satisfyingly satiating to my soul and sight (got to love unnecessary redundancies in writing): I will read anything written about someone’s 9 to 5 nuance at any time of day or night.

My day and night, however, has not been filled with succeeding in catching up on writing, replies, and the words I wish to send using my voice (though I am somewhat trying that right now, writing, literally as “we” speak)… because I am immediately struck by a physical problem I have been facing for the last three days.

After deciding to “work out” with my daughter a few days ago- what was then only four days after my last major surgery- I am finding a matter of faction that feels like fiction whenever I try to report it to anyone as a symptom… but that has plagued me for as far as I can remember (which technically isn’t very far, because I believe my brain cells have been anesthesi’zed into the size of a goldfish lately).

My daughter wanted to practice for her tryout for a cross-country team (something her dancer mom kept foolishly calling an “audition” by accident), but even a small amount of joyous movement did what it always accidentally does despite my very urbane intent:

I am faced with Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness… which I did NOT know had a name (DOMS) until I Googled it for this very piece. (Living and continually learn?)

Who knew that my lifelong plight had a catchy little acronym?

Copy V, repeat?

I have never recovered normally from what my peers and loved ones experience in equal measure. In fact, I have practically measured the difference by constantly data collecting and running a running consensus on what other dancers, and athletes, and even just normal 40+ year olds like my partner (who will find that sentence offensive, though he doesn’t read my writing so it serves him right) experience.

Soreness is normal.

Even pulling muscles can be normal.

But - and I never share or write about this EVER so (as this will be literally my first time), please go easy on me as I’m not trying to be whiny - I often cannot walk 2 to 3 days after doing something that my body is fairly conditioned to do.

I’ve written about this once (maybe?), many years ago after a large performance we had had; Saying something about how difficult it is to hop around all day after a show, when others are waddling with bruises and Arnica but not completely immobilized… and how that’s been the case since my early 20s.

It doesn’t matter how much I dance or have trained for those exact moments and movements: my body almost always reacts the same (and by that I mean, it overreacts).

I have learned over the years that what is normal for me is actually abnormal for every friend I’ve ever interviewed, family member I’ve witnessed at close distance after a long-distance-athletic-anything, and fellow athletes I’ve asked for advice.

I do everything in a recovery “cool down” process you could possibly imagine (from icing, to heat, to creams, to borderline shaman rituals) and no magical equation has ever made my body any less rigid and rebellious in its “recovery” roll out… which is something I’ve learned to just shut up about, accept, and call a part of life.

It’s the price I pay for wanting to do what healthcare tells us: stay active… stay limber… “don’t give up”.

In the past, if I work very fastidiously on stretching, for example- with every amount of labeled technique, tradition, or professional torque… I will eventually simply herniate an entire disc or joint, instead of seeing slow and softly-earned improvement.

I don’t “improve”, you see… I just give towards something until by body eventually fails entirely.

I stretch… and it pops a bone or two.

I don’t write about it because I had to accept this as a consequence of wanting something, anything - an achievement that’s somatic in nature. It’s unnatural to be someone who works and works and never conditions, or who trains and trains and never truly gains (or, at least, who’s pain-punishment for each ending never lessens in severity). Dancing everyday for years, as you can imagine, was brutal- because I was always a couple of days away from the ‘other shoe dropping’… and that other shoe was always a delayed onset stiffness so significant that I (like the last two days, as I write this) can sometimes genuinely not walk.

No amount of “mind over matter” matters.

So today?

Today, I am waking up by dictating the truth with my voice… and detailing how much that truth dictates the way my daily “ 5 to 9” deals out:

Whether suffering that stands alone…

Or standing alone to hide the suffering.

PART ONE. Continued tomorrow.