Sometimes, Deprivation is a Choice

NOTE: My entries are published non-linearly, offered to the world based only on courage. Today’s entry was originally penned on September 8^th. Here, I’m ready to share.

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Let me tell you, I’m amazed with my body. I can’t tell you if I’ve ever, across my sixty years, simply witnessed her miraculousness.

After each baby pushed through, I tortured her back—however I defined back—each time. Wore girdles, dieted, dehydrated, crunched her into size four. Sometimes size two. I liked her better smaller, flatter, leaner.

I knew she knew this.

I’m sad about this now.

I can’t imagine liking anyone for anything external.

Here, today, I’m letting her.

Letting her be her in all her glory.

Letting her heal.

I left the ICU twelve pounds heavier and thirty percent less muscle mass than when I’d arrived. I can press anywhere on her—my body—all the way through to the other side, to another galaxy. After my neck collapsed, twice, I spent two years struggling to re-gain control and use of both hands and my lower right leg. (You can read my essay, “Braced and Bedazzled” about this chapter in my life in The Rumpus).

Here, an image of me around 2014, braced and navigating university, single-motherhood, and not healing.

I pushed and pushed her—my body—telling her, You’ll heal stronger. I honed ambidextrous ways. I quit wearing my lower leg brace, telling myself, This hurts, and It gouges my ankle.

I’m a liar.

The brace is ugly. It makes me feel vulnerable and broken.

I never wanted my body to need support like that…

(continue reading this Write2Heal article over at Substack)