Loosey Goosey

July 23, 2023

Maybe my thoughts won’t flow as well being funneled here, on a channel with the intention to be seen and reacted to. My hope of course is that these words are absorbed by any creative juices that the reader may have as they consume it, and in turn create something palatable from it… or is that my responsibility to make it as such?

Sometimes my thoughts just feel convoluted, and maybe if I share them elsewhere, they can be dissected further. Ideas and thoughts, although ably insightful and helpful, also have the capacity to plague the brain and leave us battered and tired. Sure, 'plague' is quite negative, and I don’t care to play the writer trope that spins every word, hoping to knock their readers out of their socks with a new perspective or way of understanding a vocabulary word. That is far too semantical a game to play. It is profound to say that thoughts can be plaguing. But thoughts can make us sick. Sickness, the more modest older sister of the word “plague” may be easier to digest.

You wouldn’t have health without sickness, the same as you wouldn’t have life without death. And I guess what I am seeking to paint is the connection between how people can find the beauty in death in the same way I have found beauty in sickness. Death, like sickness arguably, is the less enjoyable of it's counterpart- life or health. But it is only in trials of malady that conjure the ache to seek stillness, comfort, peace. Health and life do not beg of you these things. But sometimes rejoicing doesn’t beg for your stillness like mourning does. Just the same that health does not cry out for your attention as sickness does. Sickness cries out for your attention, and although you are not healthy, you are working to fight something, inward and outward, and thus is living.

So I have been sick, physically injured rather, and I have done a lot of sitting and thinking. Sitting and thinking is easy when all is quiet and calm around you. When the only audible sounds are a fresh drawer of ceramic coffee mugs whirring about on the final spin cycle of the dishwasher. When the wind outside is whispering to the leaves of the tree that shades your back deck, causing them to stir and rattle, their secrets audible yet incoherent through the window pane. When the only sounds are of bikers whizzing and huffing by on Dutch cobblestone as you sit crosslegged with a brew by your forearm. You put yourself in the lull of the kitchen, by a window full of lush green, in the Netherlands on a summer day. But when you are put in a setting forcibly to sit and think, it is not always as calm and sweet.

When I am submitted to flesh and bone eternal doom, the exaggerative way of saying “getting injured”, I’m a few tiers below my normal operative functionality and thus I am forced to sit and wait, without my body’s consent to rest. Nonconsensual immobilization, if you will. I have to be still because my body will not permit otherwise. I am not healthy and I must lie down.

As I have grown older, I have noticed the responsibilities that “healing” and “resting” bar me of and I am not so perturbed. Nobody expects you meet them anywhere at a certain time, people see if they can accommodate you in some way- through food or gestures, when you're in public on crutches, people ask you what happened in a genuine curiosity and wish you healing on your way out the door. I'm not mad about any of those things now. Whereas when I was a teen, the collective agreement to take time for yourself following injury or sickness, to not have any expectations to perform well or function in society, wasn’t as much of a treat as it was a giant limitation at my sprightly age. All I seemed to focus on was how many activities I was missing out on, how physically limited I was, and moreover how my own body was atrophying right before my eyes.

I focused on how my once toned stomach got looser by the day, as I was unable to run or jump or do yoga. I would stand before an eight foot mirror, pivoting my feet to analyze my “loosening” tummy and thighs at any angle that light and glass permitted. Sometimes this little number isn’t so foreign, and I still catch myself these days comparing the shape of my hips from the way I imagined they looked a week ago, and I manipulate my breath to fill my diaphragm in different ways, steadily focused on the new shape my torso takes on. Then, stupidly, I gaze upwards from my middle to my face and it is new and familiar. It remains unblemished, I don’t find any hidden lines or crinkles, but it is mature and developed and I find it fascinating that all the features that sit on it illuminate themselves all the same.

I don’t think you take note of your specific features until you are really at a point in your adolescence to begin comparing yourself with others. “She has such thick brown hair, what does mine look like?”. Well upon analyzing my digitals cameras photos from my 4th grade birthday party, I’ll come to discover that mine is fine and thin. It is long and blonde with laces of brown hues throughout. I like it. And in due time some of the brighter streaks will fade into a darker brown, and I will pay for blonde highlights seasonally like many other girls, clinging onto our identifiers we have known since we were kids. But of course it just starts with hair, delineating what sets us apart from one another. Next it is her amber eyes versus your hazel green, her thigh gap versus your absence, her petiteness versus your full bodiedness, it is her…

Well it can only go so far until you have run out of parts to compare. You will struggle for a while, coming to terms with the fact your skinny pre-teen body now carries a bottom and rack with her in every setting, and not just to the setting where it is deemed welcome and practical, you have them everywhere. You marvel at your womanness in contrast to the twiggy little thing you were at 14. It took a while to adapt, with part of your identity as this skinny, long haired blonde. It was frustrating, it was dieting, it was confusion, it was exercising. Of course as an athlete, dieting and exercising aren’t so much a means to an end as they are general up-keep, part of the competitive world you signed up for. It is part of your life to live this way, working out often and growing muscle to be better at your sport. But you didn’t know when you would be content with what you saw in the mirror, even after all the effort and days of hard play. When will I get back to the body I once knew?, you ask. There inlies the dissonance you burdened.

There will be times where you are incredibly proud of your strength, and the muscularity and fullness you have developed with age isn’t so shameful. When you complete a four day hike of Machu Picchu at age 20, scaling extreme terrain at nearly 14,000 feet of altitude. And alas after blisters, parasites from unfit drinking water, mosquito fleets in sleeping bags, and agitating plantar fasciitis, you were one of the few that made it to the top. A group of nearly twenty-two that dwindled down to just six. A couple from Marseille that demonstrates real passion and puppy love for one another, and a father and daughter of Quebec that bicker and joke, slipping in and out of French and English, your Quechuan tour guide, Virgilio, and you. After the trek you’ll stay at a hostel as a treat to yourself and on the first night at 3am you will get up from your bed to pee. You will look in the dimly lit mirror at your naked body after what was the greatest lengths you could have pushed yourself in real life, not on a volleyball court under the shelter of a school or convention center, not on the Chapel Hill road stretch of a ten mile race that you thought was ten kilometers when you signed up, but instead, the rawest of real life. You’ll smile with satisfaction and amazement that your legs and arms and fingers and toes could carry you to the top of that mountain amidst everything that gnawed at you to stop. And you’ll shut off the lamp and tip toe back to sleep satisfied and changed.

Now, I sit in a shower chair at my parents house, injured, recovering from surgery, and in need of assistance and rehabilitation. This time I experience real muscular atrophy on my right leg, all of it. From my now squishy hip, to my limp thigh, to my calf, wasting away. The hot water hits my back and my scraggly wet hair clings to my shoulders. I look at my incision, stinging slightly from the pressure of the shower head, still purple as my red blood cells race to repair the cut. My hands trail upward from below my knee and I play with the extra skin, fat, and jiggle my thigh now holds. I know that my knee is healing, all of its tendons and ligaments and other slimy innards are busy getting better. I laugh again, louder this time, thinking about the time I used to be ashamed of this body that held me up for so long.

~~~

One day I’ll write a book, but I’m not sure when. A published copy isn’t going to fly in and land in my hands, I know that. I feel like I make little sporadic efforts to work towards the goal of publishing, but my plans for material deviate, shift, adjust, reverse, cartwheel, and moonwalk. Sometimes I say memoir, but the evil bug in my ear tells me that I don’t have enough life experience to fill in between the covers. Or then I bat my eyes at plotting a fiction novel but it smacks its lips and tells me the trope has been done before. So I guess all I can say now is you gotta start somewhere, even if that means the first one is shit.

xx talk soon!

Brynn