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(thread) I planned to spend the last three weeks at an artist residency (totally quarantined and very covid precautious), where I arrived, full of vim and vigor, after four months of grappling with a very painful herniated-disc related relapse of sciatica.
After a slew of treatments, I had improved enough to travel and was elated. For four glorious days I wrote my ass off and thanked my lucky stars. Then, apropos of nothing much, I woke up in a terrible new version of familiar pain.
For three more days, I tried to work through it. I made ice-packs out of snow and Ziplock bags, and wrote while lying on the floor, supported by various pillows. By the third day, I was crawling to the bathroom and refrigerator. By the 4th day, I couldn't sleep or brush my teeth.
For days, my partner had been begging me to call my mother, who lives three hours away from the residency, and finally I did. That evening, she dropped everything and drove up to find me trapped on the floor, unsure if I could even make it to the bathroom again.
My 65-year-old mom packed up all my things and got me into the car. After calling no less than twenty hospitals and pain care centers, a sympathetic nurse (GOD BLESS NURSES) made room in a dr's schedule for me this past Tuesday.
I will spare both you and I the details of the ways my mother had to care for me in the intervening days, but trust that it was a kind of excruciating return to infancy. I am so immeasurably fortunate to have had someone to lovingly care for me this way.
On Tuesday I received an epidural steroid shot and have improved slowly day by day. I still can't stand on my own for more than a few minutes, but I hope to be able to travel home to Iowa this week. I miss my love. I miss my dog. I want to go home.
I'm usually hesitant to share this kind of personal stuff here, but decided to for a few reasons: 1) I am aghast at the degree to which we all expect ourselves to keep working through catastrophe. I have been deleting apologies from my (barely) delayed emails for the past 4 yrs.
In the past year, I worked through the pandemic's peak in NYC, moving across the country, starting a new job, a relentlessly traumatic news cycle, and the election. I know that my life is incredibly privileged in so many ways and still, it was too much. Way too much.
I am certain that my body's breakdown is directly related to working through the stress of all of this. I have spent my entire life dismissing the detrimental and cumulative effect of stress on my body. I have resisted the plain fact that I AM my body.
Lots of smart folks have written lots of smart things about this recently and here is one by @annehelen https://annehelen.substack.com/p/how-to-work-through-a-coup
In Girlhood, I've reckoned some w/ my often inhumane dissociation from my body, & how this treatment reflects the values of a patriarchal, white supremacist, sickly capitalistic society (my body is far from the most vulnerable to this indoctrination). It is a work in progress.
I want this to be a lesson to me. Not bc the body's hurts should always function as lessons, but because there is a clear one here for me. To take care. To listen. To resist the internal & external pressure of expectations that I have not chosen and in which I do not believe.
The second reason I wanted to share this is because we have not a clue what is going on with other people. I rarely share this kind of thing because it isn't anyone's business. I am lucky enough to have the care and support I need in my personal life; I don't need to get it here.
But I have been chastened over & over by the revelations of what other people are working through, writing emails through, making phone calls through, writing through. When I don't want to forget something, I either write about it or tattoo it on my body (lol), so I'm writing it.
A final note: you who suffer from chronic pain have my heart. You are heroes. I know that we are all either already in or on our way to the kingdom of the sick, as Sontag wrote. I wish that when well, we could all hold that knowledge & reverence for the folks that will greet us
