You Can’t Be “Well” at Being Unwell

Healing is not without pain.

Life, for me, is full of it. Surgeries have not taken it away… they’ve only not made it worse.

“Not worse” and “Better” are not the same… but we live in a results driven culture. ‘Why fight the battle if you can’t win?’ we seem to say… even when we don’t realize we are the ones saying it.

Ballerinas are often perfectionists. We don’t like to aim for something we aren’t “good” at; hobbies, goals, gigs. So to have my personality type, and be from a family of overachievers (who ALL… literally ALL achieve tremendously) is sometimes like having Incubus’ “Oil and Water” as your only inner monologue.

Any time someone says, “How did the latest procedure go?” And I can’t say, “Amazing! Science changed and I’m suddenly fixed”!… I feel like a failure. It doesn’t matter how old I am. How many decades on this earth. If I can’t be “good” at something… I can’t BE at all. So my life is, in ways, skewered: even when someone else might say- “You handle having a body that’s made of oil and water considerably well”… I know it’s not fixed, so therefor it’s not well.

One could (and should) argue that you can’t be “well” at being unwell. If you tough it out through extreme pain better than others that howl: What sort of achievement is that? Can it go on an epitaph? Hang on a wall in gold and bronze?

I did this most recent surgery to try to be able to sit (and thus write) for longer. For years, every damn email… Every damn post… Every damn bit of bookkeeping or logistical upkeep comes with a crushing coalition of cramp (I long for better alliteration for agony; feel free to suggest). But with that hope comes the constant hinderance of knowing that “not worse” and “better” are still 2 very different things.

You don’t have to be a ballerina to think like one… and if I can’t be good at something, “why am I doing it”?

THAT is how the mind of a perfectionist thinks. It’s the danger of living and loving and walking amongst them (us). And, in my case, it’s the lifelong exhaustion of being one…

Oil and water, always, at once.

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