I Was Performing With the Circus Around a Month Later

I’d perform on one stage, drive a couple hours to a new city, and perform a different show on a different stage in the same day.

I know it’s a pain that I keep writing about pain…

But you never know who’s going to see something in this shadow abyss of what was once called ‘socials’.

I don’t show pain the way I’m told to show it.

My mother is known for being stoic and so are many others in my family. I have been called stoic time and time again by healthcare (I am not in terms of ASL-face), and I am not stoic compared to my Momma… but, I am compared to the “sad-versus-scream smile system” of graphics on an ER wall.

I don’t cry when I wake up from surgeries.

I don’t cry when I’m delivering babies without medications.

I don’t show pain the way the world thinks we show pain… so what happens when we don’t fit on the 1 to 10 smile scale?

“My last cervical surgery was in 2020… and I was back to directing a week later.”

This is the big myth I like to say.

It’s not a myth (it’s true), but it leaves out various facts. Things like “I had the help of a best friend who learned much of the movement in advance” or “It hurt horrifically to try to raise my voice loud enough for a room of teenagers to be able to hear me”.

That was much less of a surgery than the one I just had (one disc instead of two) and less impressive than the other Edward Blooms of my lexicon. Plus, I am currently recovering from a completely different surgery (ovarian cysts and sh*t) which I will update you on soon enough (thank you for caring, if you’re reading this).

After my first cervical disc replacement (which was not my first spine surgery), I was performing with the circus around a month later.

It was at the same time our dance theatre company was coming back post pandemic-pause too. I’d perform on one stage, drive a couple hours to a new city, and perform a different show on a different stage in the same day.

This was as insane as it sounds… but I also was deliriously happy within my exhaustion, because some of us have Cirque hearts and some of us can’t understand why we’d do that to ourselves.

I use my pancreatitis-ish-ness as the example of ‘ability to push through pain’ a lot of the time (because that’s understood by most staff as one of the most painful conditions to occur… let alone smile en pointe through), but “being in two shows at once, a handful of weeks after my first cervical disc replacement” is a little more niche.

It’s surreal and amorphous even for me to look back on- always moving in its painful semi-immobility, even as a memory made memorable by its exactness.

I was scrolling through my phone recently to organize and off-load footage- memories that make me sad right now because I miss people and performances so much- and stumbled upon the thin timestamp distance of my being in a ‘surgery-wing’ back then, to the ‘wings of the stage’… and that’s when I realized how close the clock really cut it.

It’s hard to explain that nuance to a physician or tech unless you know spines, and circuses, and shanks (pointe shoes) and so on; How much it can take a person to push through something, but still register “fairly high” on the numerical Suffer System.

The context for all the little things that make up the “Big Fishes” of our lives are almost endless for most of us… and the last thing that matters (for me) are numbers.

I miss feeling like I could defy gravity with surgeries and not the other way around.

I have so many “pushing through pain” stories at this point, en pointe, that the largest ones begin to feel meaningless, and sometimes…

So does the pain.

PART TWO.

Continued tomorrow….

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