Sob story

Watch where you step

Today’s accompanying tune: “The Old Religion” by Florence + The Machine

I forget exactly how, exactly, the toenail died. It may have been during a race, or after some hill repeats in poorly fitting shoes. It may have been a result of my own clumsiness, ramming into furniture that never moved but, for some reason, my brain refused to acknowledge. All I know is that I watched the nail go from red, to purple, to black, to gray as my body got to work rectifying the mistake I’d put it through. Just as the healing process had concluded, I did what I do best. I made another mistake, slamming the tender new nail, still soft in its infancy, into the small step into my shower, propelling my body forward while my foot remained stubbornly lodged in the wooden slats. For such minor body parts, toes somehow house a disproportionate amount of nerve endings. The pain of a jammed toe, one healing from its last injury, rolled through my body as I stood under the hot water, waiting for the waves to cease.

I blinked, squeezing my eyes tight in hopes that, if I couldn’t see the pain, it couldn’t see me. It would subside, and I’d be left to go about the rest of my evening with little more than a bruised ego and a reminder to always, always, look where I’m stepping. As true on the technical trails I run as in the little blue house I amble around the rest of the time. But as it swelled and turned red, I accepted that my evening would be spent with frozen vegetables resting on my propped up foot instead of tending to the nascent vegetables attempting to root in my garden. As I hobbled out of the shower and back into the kitchen, I bit my lip. In the commotion, in those few minutes of searing pain that wouldn’t loosen its grip, I hadn’t cried.

I didn’t cry the morning I slid down the trail, another instance of failing to look at where I was stepping. I tumbled to the ground and, given the grade, kept going. I picked rocks out of my skin and rinsed the gash with some water before picking up my pace and jogging back to the car. I washed it, dressed it, and admired how well I’d handled my first technical trail running incident. I’d let the blood run down my leg and into my socks, much to the horror of the day hikers passing me on their way up to the vista. It hadn’t hurt in the moment, and I hadn’t cried. If anything, I was proud of my composure, my ability to resist the urge to catastrophize, the matter-of-factness that I held onto as I continued to clean and care for the minor wound in the days that followed. I felt assured, I felt tough.

It’d been the same when I sprained my foot months earlier during a trail race, the mundanity of the urgent care process enough to deaden any emotional outburst as I watched the skin grow taught around the injured tendons. As the hours dragged by, I watched as teens with bright red faces walked in with their parents after the soccer game gone wrong or the football practice that nearly guaranteed injury. My composure led the doctor to question whether my injury was just anxiety, at least until the imaging results came back. I mentally praised myself; I hadn’t cried. I could withstand pain and emerge on the other side without fuss.

The people who raised me would’ve been proud, had we still spoken. They’d punished me relentlessly in childhood for my sensitivity, as they called it. My propensity to burst into tears at the slightest shift in the wind or misinterpreted word. My inability to “take a joke.” My tendency to assume every injury, permanent, a life-altering mistake that could change the course of my life. The pain, compounded by days without books or television, amplified in isolation as I learned to “toughen up.” I embarrassed them in public, in front of their friends, in front of family, if I cried while recounting an instance of schoolyard bullying. They hurled insults across the family room if they noticed my face growing pink as I shoved it further into a book, the plot hitting the soft spots and triggering tears. I’d never make it in the real world, they said. No one would coddle me there; no one would put up with my outbursts. They were, after all, just trying to do me a favor, they said.

In the early years spent living outside of their home, their preparation hadn’t worked, though the shame they’d expertly installed remained on my hard drive. I excused myself to bathrooms and closets, tucked myself under blankets and into the high necklines of my shirts. I bit my lips when I tasted pennies, and refused to make eye contact as my tear ducts filled. In private, I admonished myself for my sensitivity, my inability to take criticism, my propensity to feel so deeply the pains of others. I tried to bury it away, to wash it down, to turn myself off as soon as the threat emerged. I kinked the hose and twisted the knob.

Eventually, it worked. I could watch weepy movies in theaters, or read tragedies in parks. I could be on the other end of the line as the people who raised me berated me for one imagined transgression or another as I climbed the hills in a city thousands of miles away. I could ask for mental health leave from a demanding job and listen as my boss said that wouldn’t be possible, and my only option would be to leave permanently. I could handle it, my ego whispered. The shame whirred to life any time I faltered. I could hear their voices in my ear —“She’s just so sensitive” — dismissing whatever roiled inside me. Pride wouldn’t let me give them what I imagined they wanted, even as the dam threatened to break.

I stopped trusting myself, my body, my mind. I’d distanced myself so thoroughly from its cues that I could no longer recognized their shape, their feel. I continued to hold myself to standards enacted by people who wanted nothing but hardship for me, and sometimes placed them on others. What the people who raised me failed to explain was that there was no way to turn off a single emotion, a single feeling. When I turned one off, I lost them all.

The world wasn’t built for emotional outbursts, that was true. But the farther I got from my emotional world, the duller everything else became. Music rendered itself into simply repetition; thoughtfully written texts were titles to check off in a notes app. My inability to compose myself wasn’t reflected in those seated next to me in movie theaters or even on my couch. I wasn’t better off for maintaining distance; I was losing entire tracts of human experience to shame. Eventually, the pendulum swung, the dam broke. I don’t remember the instigating event exactly, but I’m sure there were tears. My pride had taken a new direction. I wouldn’t give the people who raised me what I now knew they wanted — a daughter as thoroughly miserable, jaded, and disconnected as they had become.

I would not accept the world as they knew it, one without the highs or the lows. One reliant only on complacency, on contentment. One in which comfort is to be sought after as the only acceptable form of joy. In avoiding what they think is pain, they’ve only invited it to root, its once innocuous tendrils growing stronger until the natives are covered in it, smothered by it. It is a world in which only pain and fear flourish. It is not one I will be returning to, though it was one I unknowingly inhabited for far too long.

The night before I jammed my toe, I’d let the tears flow as music filled a stadium, sweeping me away and placing me gently back in my seat. I’d felt that which I couldn’t name — a mixture of joy, relief, intense gratitude, awe at the dedication to art and beauty, the sheer determination of remaining human in a world so dedicated to wiping that out — as I watched the artist spend tens of minutes embracing every single attendee stationed in the front row. “Oh, you don’t have to cry!” the artist said to a woman a few rows back with her hand covering her mouth. The artist pulled the woman forward and into her arms over the barricade. The tenderness roiled me, the desire to cradle instead of coddle driving a fresh batch of tears to descend my cheeks. How lovely. How deeply human.

In comparison, the jammed toe was a nuisance. An interruption. A reminder that I inhabit this body at its own discretion; how I treat it is undoubtedly how it will treat me. The bloody leg was a testament to the power of endorphins, the soar of the runner’s high. The sprained foot a word of caution, a visceral warning to always be exactly where your feet are, and not a foot ahead or behind.

My lack of tears in each instance wasn’t a testament to my strength, or my composure. They failed to appear because there was no fear in experiencing pain, no terror in enduring discomfort that wasn’t life threatening. In comparison to the range of emotions I’d tapped into, a little physical pain failed to register, failed to trip the wire beyond annoyance or frustration. I trusted my body to react, trusted myself to feel it out.

I’d immersed myself in this world, and though I know it is foolish to imagine coming out of it unscathed entirely, I am better for it. We all are.

Here’s to feeling it all.

- Megan