The Language of the Broken
My current somatic journey is disrupting most aspects of my life at this moment. One massive disruption for this word nerd is kind of obvious given that my entire world revolves around communicating narratives. Language is now both a barrier and a trigger. I lack access to adequate language for the new floor I'm forced to build. Hell, I built an entire operating system just to translate my language for my care providers.
Words like “recovery, healing, cure, restore, normal” no longer apply; but little exists to replace them. The friction is subtle at first but steadily grows into a uncontrollable flame as well-intended humans in my sphere use the Language of the Able to try and give hope or advice. After a while, the Language of the Able just reinforces the fact that my floor is now crooked, or non-existent, and we no longer stand on even, equal ground.
For me, the frustration of people using language that implies restitution– after following the ephemeral prescriptions of the traditional medical establishment or with positive thinking draped in wellness theatre– grows into an internal scream over time. When people imply returning to "normal", or refer to the future as some place where the pain will pass and I’ll return to the body I had before the injury, I internally spiral. Here’s what it looks like.
I hear the “oh, you’ll be better soon, just do your PT exercises” or any reference to “recovery”, my brain explodes. I know the sentiments are delivered with compassion, but they are false statements of bypassing that I’ve spent many hours trying to release. I fight like hell to remove the notion of "normal" or "recovery" from my language because with my condition, that’s not physically possible.
So when someone uses that language, no matter how well intended, I snap inside. I want to correct them so they realize this is never going away and I have to restructure my entire perception of reality and my future to survive every day. The diminishment of my experience by someone casually stating things will return to what was sends a dagger deep into the place where my dark nights of the soul live. It minimizes my pain and places me on the defensive.
Does this person realize there is no returning to what was? Is this person thinking I’m just exaggerating and if I do one more round of lat pulls and another set of planks the 6 discs in my neck will magically repair the 25 years of somatic override and my spine will function properly again? Or does this person just want to give me a pat on the back, say “there, there” and move onto the next topic du jour?
I get all of it. I’ve been plenty guilty of doing the same to others in chronic situations in the past. My training as a yogi was heavily infused with Ram Dass’ teachings and that’s where I learned to really just sit with the pain or illness of another. Not that I was good at it back then, I probably used ableist language as well and bypassed the hard stuff in an attempt to ease someone else’s pain. I get it. But now that roles are reversed and I’m the one navigating this new landscape, I have a completely different perspective on it all.
And the language I am learning to use, and also learning to reject, is one of the hardest aspects of building my new floor.
Not recovery – re-calibration.
Not healing – maintaining
Not normal – “my new floor”
Not restoration – acceptance
Other words I’m learning to make peace with on this journey towards acceptance are; surrender, grief, humor, vulnerability, acknowledgement, pain, medication, disabled, broken, sorrow, joy, gratitude.
Those words are not new to me, by any means. Such words simply have a new context now. I'm learning to apply these words into new situations in this body I’m re-establishing a relationship with as I rebuild the floor. And those words, the Language of the Broken, also serve as the foundation my new floor is being built upon. Because I know full well that I'll spend the rest of my life navigating the beauty and sorrow of this situation and if I fall through the floor every time things go sideways, I'll never find peace. So this time, crawling out of this latest round of therapy and reality, I'm building a floor that's resilient enough to hold me when the trap door gets pulled again.
Or I hope I am. And I'm doing it in public so a roadmap for others exists; a map grounded in daily data, sifted through the world's most advanced pattern recognition machine and drawn from the raw field notes of a witness in her own cremation grounds making sense of the chaos.
Until four months ago when round two of PT began, I did believe that the narrative of restitution and its hopeful etymology was mine to frolic within. I believed, naively so and against the signals from my body itself, that if I worked hard enough at PT and explored new treatments or approaches, I could restore what was lost. That I could return to a version of my old “normal” with some minor tweaks that would be expected at my age. Halfway through that therapy round, my body went sideways and it took everything I thought I would restore one day with it.
Reality is a bitch that way. Grief became my daily companion and it sat right next to Pain and forced me towards Acceptance.
The only alternative was depression, or worse. And while I oscillate between all of those prickly emotions on the daily as I transition out of chaos and into the quest narratives (from A Wounded Storyteller by Author Frank), I’m learning to embrace the Language of the Broken as both my tool to prevent bypassing and a compass to navigate this new journey.
And if nothing else, I hope that by embracing the Language of the Broken, the new floor I'm building will be strong enough that I won't crash right through it into freefall every time my body goes sideways in the future.
This essay was written organically from my daily field notes for A Somatic Unraveling: Field Notes from the Cremation Grounds a creative writing project helping me write my new Quest Narrative and find a way through the pain towards...whatever comes next.
I'm publishing the companion data from my HealingOS on Github. I'm also scanning the 22+ year archive of my raw, organic writing for patterns using my cstreetOS.
For each Field Note that turns into an essay here, I'm also publishing the supporting data from both OSes on Github.
