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Body positive
Mar. 11th, 2018 11:54 amTime for more of the protracted deep-dive catch-up! I had a request for body talk, so I’ll start there.
So, I’m in pain much of the time, and have been for many years. I used to watch other people with extremely chronic pain and think I wouldn’t be able to function, or I’d just be cranky and bitch about it all the time. And yeah, it compromises my functionality, and it does make me cranky, and I do bitch sometimes, but not to the extent that I feared. What I wouldn’t have anticipated is how much of my life is about managing pain: how many hours a day I’m massaging myself, or days a month I’m at appointments for it; how much of my life gets arranged around dealing with it.
Underlying it all has been a gigantic, frustrating, baffling question: WHY? And at age 44, I finally have an answer. I deduced it via work from a visceral manipulator, Joanna Welch, who has been following patterns of compression, adhesion, and dysfunction through various systems intersecting in my torso. It has impacted everything from my breathing (like being unable to get a full breath while biking across the nation) to digestion (pain from eating has become the default) to the swarm of easily-irritated trigger points in my body - and I wonder, perhaps to my lack of breast development, including failure to lactate enough for my baby. Joanna has been creating slack in my connective tissue and freeing adhesions for many months, which begs the question of why there is a need for so much work. Why am I all squished into a non-optimal shape, if not by some traumatic incident early in life?
Huh. Like, say, a car accident at age three, in which I impacted the car so hard it left glass in my forehead?
That is literally all I know of the accident, all I was ever told. I was strapped into a car seat in the front passenger seat, but it was not strapped into the car and so went flying when my dad braked to avoid someone running a red light. My parents picked glass out of my forehead rather than take me to the hospital, and they gave me a yellow lollipop for being so good about it. That was the end of the matter.
No one ever made a connection to the fact that, according to my parents, they took me to multiple doctors when I was in preschool, to find out what was wrong with my wheezy, restricted breathing. “Not asthma” was as far as anyone got. No one wondered for me at my chest muscles randomly going into spasm, which felt like being stabbed with an ice-pick for no particular reason. No one thought it unusual that a teenage girl would have a neck so tight that no one could ever make a dent in the tension; so tight, in fact, that it would send her to massage school and into an entire career, trying to understand the mystery.
So now, forty-plus years later, it is - to wildly paraphrase Churchill - an insight wrapped in a revelation wrapped in an epiphany, to deduce the cause of so much pain and dysfunction. If my forehead hit the windshield hard enough to leave glass embedded in me, the restraining straps of the carseat slammed my torso with that impact. My body was distorted, my rib cage compressed, organs shoved into non-optimal positions.
It is very slow going, undoing patterns of a lifetime, but we are getting there. I can take the deep breath that my pathetically-hindered bike-tripping self longed to. I have more and more days without painkillers, and even with little arnica. I still spend hours massaging myself most days, but I am able to make incremental progress with the tension, instead of just keeping myself from sliding into utter misery.
There are weeks it still feels like I’m playing whack-a-mole with the pain. There are times when I feel internally incoherent, terribly fragile while my tissues are re-ordering themselves. I get frustrated and anxious about whether the trajectory of improvement is enough to counter the natural aging process. I worry that I’m setting myself up for big difficulties in planning to move to WA to spend my later years in physically laborious homesteading work.
But then there are times I’m in so much less pain, that I know it’s slowly coming together and that I’m reclaiming the use of my body that is my birthright. I wake so much less often to discover that tension has pulled my ribs out of place during a few hours of sleep. It is scary to hope, after a lifetime of being knocked askew and baffled, that I could truly come into my own in my mid-forties, but I’m giving it a whirl. Here’s to spending the rest of my life glorying in the freedom and internal coherence that I missed out on for decades and will always appreciate hereafter.
So, I’m in pain much of the time, and have been for many years. I used to watch other people with extremely chronic pain and think I wouldn’t be able to function, or I’d just be cranky and bitch about it all the time. And yeah, it compromises my functionality, and it does make me cranky, and I do bitch sometimes, but not to the extent that I feared. What I wouldn’t have anticipated is how much of my life is about managing pain: how many hours a day I’m massaging myself, or days a month I’m at appointments for it; how much of my life gets arranged around dealing with it.
Underlying it all has been a gigantic, frustrating, baffling question: WHY? And at age 44, I finally have an answer. I deduced it via work from a visceral manipulator, Joanna Welch, who has been following patterns of compression, adhesion, and dysfunction through various systems intersecting in my torso. It has impacted everything from my breathing (like being unable to get a full breath while biking across the nation) to digestion (pain from eating has become the default) to the swarm of easily-irritated trigger points in my body - and I wonder, perhaps to my lack of breast development, including failure to lactate enough for my baby. Joanna has been creating slack in my connective tissue and freeing adhesions for many months, which begs the question of why there is a need for so much work. Why am I all squished into a non-optimal shape, if not by some traumatic incident early in life?
Huh. Like, say, a car accident at age three, in which I impacted the car so hard it left glass in my forehead?
That is literally all I know of the accident, all I was ever told. I was strapped into a car seat in the front passenger seat, but it was not strapped into the car and so went flying when my dad braked to avoid someone running a red light. My parents picked glass out of my forehead rather than take me to the hospital, and they gave me a yellow lollipop for being so good about it. That was the end of the matter.
No one ever made a connection to the fact that, according to my parents, they took me to multiple doctors when I was in preschool, to find out what was wrong with my wheezy, restricted breathing. “Not asthma” was as far as anyone got. No one wondered for me at my chest muscles randomly going into spasm, which felt like being stabbed with an ice-pick for no particular reason. No one thought it unusual that a teenage girl would have a neck so tight that no one could ever make a dent in the tension; so tight, in fact, that it would send her to massage school and into an entire career, trying to understand the mystery.
So now, forty-plus years later, it is - to wildly paraphrase Churchill - an insight wrapped in a revelation wrapped in an epiphany, to deduce the cause of so much pain and dysfunction. If my forehead hit the windshield hard enough to leave glass embedded in me, the restraining straps of the carseat slammed my torso with that impact. My body was distorted, my rib cage compressed, organs shoved into non-optimal positions.
It is very slow going, undoing patterns of a lifetime, but we are getting there. I can take the deep breath that my pathetically-hindered bike-tripping self longed to. I have more and more days without painkillers, and even with little arnica. I still spend hours massaging myself most days, but I am able to make incremental progress with the tension, instead of just keeping myself from sliding into utter misery.
There are weeks it still feels like I’m playing whack-a-mole with the pain. There are times when I feel internally incoherent, terribly fragile while my tissues are re-ordering themselves. I get frustrated and anxious about whether the trajectory of improvement is enough to counter the natural aging process. I worry that I’m setting myself up for big difficulties in planning to move to WA to spend my later years in physically laborious homesteading work.
But then there are times I’m in so much less pain, that I know it’s slowly coming together and that I’m reclaiming the use of my body that is my birthright. I wake so much less often to discover that tension has pulled my ribs out of place during a few hours of sleep. It is scary to hope, after a lifetime of being knocked askew and baffled, that I could truly come into my own in my mid-forties, but I’m giving it a whirl. Here’s to spending the rest of my life glorying in the freedom and internal coherence that I missed out on for decades and will always appreciate hereafter.
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