You wonder if everyone’s back burns all the time.
You love being in a classroom more than anything else in the world.
You hate sitting in the hard wood chairs in a classroom more than anything else in the world.
You spend most of your playground days getting in trouble for rallying your friends to sit in a circle by the honeysuckle bush to talk instead of playing.
You will do anything to avoid kickball.
You know in your heart that you have known a life outside of this body.
Textbook Words They Give You At Age 13 For The Aches That Live In Your Bones:
Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS)
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)
You eagerly volunteer to film every girl’s soccer game. You’re taken with the way they glide across the green. While editing, you replay kicks and passes and other sports maneuvers you don’t know the name for in slow-mo. You can’t quite pinpoint if you want to be them or date them—in which way do you want to borrow those bodies?
You swim competitively. It is the only time you feel physically powerful. You cut through its surface so easily, your shoulders free-styling, roll rhythmically. In backstroke all of your joints are smooth and in motion. You have the ability in breaststroke to rapidly dip in and out of worlds—the quiet blue swishing underworld and the raucous, bright, busyness just above its surface. Your body takes up space and makes a big splash in butterfly.
You have a flare-up that stops your world. You take a year off school and learn to listen to your body again. It’s scary. It’s lonely. But it could have been even scarier if you had kept on ignoring the way it had been screaming.
Eventually you come back. You come out. You come into yourself again.
Things You Will Eventually Find That Will Help:
The End of San Francisco By: Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein
The Punk Singer documentary
Singing loudly, dancing badly
80-90% of people with Fibromyalgia are women.
60% are between the ages 30-50.
50% report a traumatic incident as the trigger for symptoms starting.
All of your life you vacillate between periods of dramatic accentuation and embrace of your femininity and periods of subtly down-playing and silently despising it. There will never be a time when you hate it more than the year you are sick.
You know that femininity does not mean weakness. Duh, you are a women’s and gender studies major. You know this intellectually: that, that idea is essentialist and patriarchal and bullshit. But still, how much of your feelings of femininity are founded upon feeling weak? How much of your femininity feels like a deficiency? A debility?
Did the important feminist work of making a space for feminine toughness and strength come at the expense of the limitations and vulnerabilities we all have? Is there room in our fight for social and political power for the stuff of our humanity?
Things You Are Not Supposed To Say In A Piece About Coming Out With Chronic Illness:
Sometimes your body breaks because it is your only way to tell the world you are sick.
Sometimes other bodies help you forget about your own.
**Sometimes other bodies remind you of your own—this is not what you were looking for.
Sometimes you hope you will get sick. There is a dark romanticism in having your world halted. It is both the thing you most want and most fear.
Sometimes, on a bad day, you wonder if you might deserve these pains, because you did kind of ask for it from that older boy when you were 13.
Sometimes you can’t quite know the difference between the spiritual and the corporeal hurt, the pain of the past or the pain of the present.
Sometimes you wonder if others are right, if it is not a real condition after all. You do spend a lot of time in your head and you just did list a bunch of weird wishes here. Maybe you willed this into being.
“Healing is not linear. Your body remembers and it is possible to feel that way again… You are not broken.” –Fabian Romero
May you make a friend of your body.
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