The idea of joybody arose from a lifetime of painbody

It’s been rainy here after many weeks of drought, and suddenly, my body is one big bag of aches. Dry weather is best (cold or warm/hot) and cold wet is the worst.

I’ve been thinking about this blog for some time, but the idea of trying to write out all the ways my body is a literal pain was just overwhelming.

I won’t be including the ways my brain causes me pain. Most of you know at least a bit about my history of depression and anxiety and there’s some of that in my about me. (And I also won’t be including anything here about a couple of chronic issues, including lifelong migraine.)

And I wanted to write about my chronic pain issues so that it makes more sense when I write about the idea of joybody.

My Original PainBody

When you live with pain from a young age, you don’t notice that you live with pain. It’s just always there. It’s the water you swim in.

Even just a couple of years ago, I saw a meme about a doctor asking a patient where their pain level was and the patient said it was about a four… you know… normal. And the doc said, well, no pain is what’s normal.

WHAT?!

I remember from a very early age waking up and pressing all of my fingers into the wall to “wake them.” They were stiff from the get go. As was a lot of my body.

There were times when getting out of a chair, it would take me a few steps to feel like my legs were “ready.” (This still happens.)

And don’t even get me started on my low back. Or my shoulders which started getting bursitis in my early teens. (I now know what it was. Then I wouldn’t have had that word and I wouldn’t have even complained. It just was what it was.)

The Weirds of My Body

I’m pretty sure I could get a fibromyalgia diagnosis. My pain points are that widespread.

But here are a collection of things that are actually wrong with my body. (And if you’ve been in class with me, you know I say, “I’ve never seen your actual skeleton so I don’t know your body enough to tell you what you can or should/not do.”

Well, I’ve seen plenty of my skeleton:

• I have congenital hip dysplasia on my left side. As a dancer, I used this for extreme flexibility tricks. Someone should have told me to stop. (This hip dysplasia will come up later in a significant way.)

• My right tibia is twisted inward.

• Which makes my right knee only point forward if my right foot is out a bit.

• The last vertebra on my right side overgrew and connect to the top of my pelvis.

• And all of my joints are hypermobile. Again, this was something that dance took advantage of and praised… oy…

Stepping on Nails

I lived with all of this pretty quietly. And it got worse over time as I got depressed and moved less and less. It got so bad that…

I was coming down the stairs in my house and I took a step and was 100% convinced I had stepped on a nail. I was convinced that when I looked down, I would see TONS OF BLOOD. But of course, that wasn’t what had happened. From this moment for the next couple of years, it would just randomly happen and I would spend too much time on the couch. I started to actually look into canes. In my mid 30s.

It would also get so bad that I would do the stairs on my butt… yep.

I’ve told this story a million times but in my late 30s, I met a PT at a party. I was talking a lot about my love of martial arts films, and she said, “Do you want to do martial arts?” And I said, “OH! I can’t… not with my hip!” And she said, “Yeah… I’ve been watching how you walk… I could fix that…”

I went to Cleveland to see her for three hours and it cost more money than I had and was worth ten times as much.

She taught me how to access my core while walking. I walked over and over again, slowly, around the small park in my neighborhood to retrain my body. It worked.

Until… it all started up again…

The Magical Doc

By this time, I was dancing many hours a day every day and teaching what would become Peony Somatic Dance. So when it started to happen again, I was devastated. I asked around and found a musculoskeletal doc.

And finally! He figured out my hip dysplasia was some of the worst he’d ever seen and that it was shortening my psoas muscles. He said he usually only saw it that bad in ultra runner types and that dancers usually had the opposite problem but thanks to my skeleton… again, ugh.

He believed that once I was armed with the diagnosis that I could figure out what to do. And I did. And I did the tings I needed to do every single day, multiple times a day, and if it even feels a teensy bit like that to this day, I go right back to those basics.

And finally tennis

I still have pain. I have days and weeks and months where I’m never pain free but I’m not in the kind of pain I used to be because of how much I move.

The more I move, the more I can move and the better my body and mind feel. There’s no stopping. (Except when there is and then the whole depression cycle starts up again.)

One thing, though, that I’d been avoiding for all these years was tennis.

I was afraid of getting hurt, because if I’m hurt and can’t dance, well, I’m screwed.

But after two frozen shoulders, I said, FUCK IT! I LOVE TENNIS! (And have since I was quite small.)

And that has been everything. It was the final key I needed for this body puzzle. I am as in love with tennis as I have ever been with dance, and it pushes me in ways that dance does not.

When I’m playing tennis, it is really clear to me that this body would have been so much happier in this world if I had not used my intellect as an escape pod from my life. My life would have been completely different if I had taken my physicality this seriously from the get go but alas… I am taking it seriously now and that matters.

My Point

I know pain. I know chronic pain. And I cannot overemphasize how much MORE important it is for those of us who suffer to find ways to move that are joyful.

We’ve been living, most likely, in a sort of fearful relationship with our body, which then affects our mind and the rest of our lives.

Gently and with patience we can come out of that fear relationship through play. Once we navigate through these early stages, we can start doing more challenging things.

But we must consciously take on this task. These choices we make right now will affect how we age.

I want to be one of those 90 somethings that is still playing tennis multiple times a week and of course creating dance. How about you?

Faster, Bigger, Better

When I was in graduate school completing my MA in English (and half of another in History before depression settled in and ruined all the things), I worked at the university I was attending and one of my professors would walk past my desk and say, “FASTER! BIGGER! BETTER!” He thought he was funny.

I was thinking about this today as I was thinking about this blog.

And I was thinking about writing this blog when I realized something pretty big on the tennis court the other day.

Or I should say that I observed it on the tennis court and really felt it. It’s something I’ve realized before but you know… it was in my brain and not in my body.

The tennis court as school

I’ve said this before and of course I believe it most deeply about dance but the movement thing that you love enough to really commit to? It’s the thing that will teach you everything you need to know about life. For today’s example…

There are often these moments when Craig and I are playing and he is getting a stray ball and making his way back to the baseline to start up play again and I end up yelling, “Hey! Let’s pick up the pace!”

When I pick up dead balls, I do it with a bounce in my step. I HURRY. Because someone is waiting.

And it hit me suddenly a few days ago: rushing is one of my most deeply embedded trauma responses. I am always making sure to do what’s been asked of me as fast as possible so there is no anger.

But there are layers

Of course, there are.

I rush so I don’t anger anyone, but I also rush so I don’t inconvenience anyone. I rush so I am not a bother. I rush so my presence is not clocked as anything but helpful.

Trauma born for sure.

But also? Patriarchy born.

Craig doesn’t rush. Like EVER. For anything.

Because he’s been taught that his time is his. That whatever he’s doing is to be done for himself at his own pace. (We talked about this and though some of these things can be hard, he does get it when it’s pointed out.)

As a white, cishet male, the world is meant to rush for him. He’s meant to take his time. However he likes it.

The middle ground

I would like to rush less, and I would like him to rush more. I don’t want him to feel the fucking anxiety that I live with thinking I have to do every damn thing as fast as possible — from my work to the dishes in the sink to whatever.

I would like to rush less. And I would like men who are slow-privileged to pick up their pace sometimes. To maybe actually think about the person waiting for/on them.

And yeah, maybe, I would like men to feel some of that anxiety that I think a lot of us feel who don’t have that privilege. Just to grow their empathy, ya know?

Another important lesson from the court

I’ve written about a huge insight I had about the importance of positive self talk while I was on the tennis court, but believe it or not, I think this thing I realized just the other day while playing is even more significant.

Craig and I were playing for only about ten minutes and I felt completely and utterly frustrated and defeated. To the point of almost crying. I told him I did not understand how I could play so well for days and days of practice and then suddenly look like I had barely ever picked up a racket (probably an exaggeration but not by as much as I would like).

He knew not to say a lot — or really anything. Platitudes can make me just melt down, and anything resembling even decent advice when I’m in that mindset, well, it just makes things worse. He knows I have to work it out myself.

I tried the positive self talk but it wasn’t helping as much this time. A little but it wasn’t turning my game around.

Then I remembered seeing something about watching only the ball.

You might think, Christine! Weren’t you watching the ball!?!?!?

And duh. Yes, of course I was, but “watch only the ball” is actually different.

I keep my eye on the ball. I’ve been taught that since I was little. Basic. But I realized I am also at the same time, watching the other player, watching my own self in my mind, watching the court. That’s a lot of watching. That’s too many focal points.

So I WATCHED ONLY THE BALL.

Suddenly it was like there was nothing else there to see. Everything else just kinda blurred.

From the moment the ball hit Craig’s racket, that was it.

Only. The. Ball.

INSTANTLY my game changed. It felt almost mystical. Zen like.

And it is, right?

This is the practice. Because after a couple of super focused ONLY the ball rallies, I could tell my focus would try — out of habit — to include all those other things. I would have to force myself to go back to ONLY the ball.

Each time I lost that, I started making mistakes. Each time I got back to that level of extreme focus, I was hitting wonderfully.

And of course, tennis — like dance — like anything that we dive deeply into and explore ourselves through — is a metaphor for the rest of our lives.

Watch ONLY the ball.

Where do you need that in your life?

A little catch up

Things are slowing down around here a bit. It’s been a bunch of months with one thing after another — lots of good things besides the awful of the world.

And right now, I feel like I have a little bit of breathing space and I’m looking forward to noticing what’s been on my mind. (When we’re busy with projects, so much goes unspoken and unwritten, at least for me.)

A few things going on with me:

• I’ve rediscovered my love of reading fiction and poetry and I’ve been making more time for this even in the middle of the day. I have been making a point to sit outside and take in some beautiful words. One day a younger person walking by turned back and said, “THAT is such a VIBE! Enjoy your day!” and it made me giggle.

• I’m fully in “obsessed with tennis” mode and I know you are likely thinking “WHAT?!? Weren’t you already?” Sure… sure… but I’m at a whole new level. I even said to Craig the other day that I really want to get good enough to feel like I could compete and have a chance of winning in some sort of older tennis player sort of matches. (I think the USTA does stuff like that.) That just feels like a really healthy dream.

• And toward that dream, I’ve gotten back into the gym to lift weights (good for you regardless of sports) and I can already tell the difference on the court only three weeks in — especially in terms of my cardio fitness.

• One of our older cats, Daisy, is really slowing down, but I’m noticing how much calmer than ever I am feeling about just being there for her and not freaking the fuck out with big time stress.

Questions for you:

• Have you read anything really freaking fantastic lately? I’d love to hear about it. Especially fiction, please.

• What are you doing for your physical body?

• And do you have any new dreams (small or big) that you’re putting energy into?