Conversation Eight
A Conversation about the things your body does that feel like obstacles — and may not have started out that way.
Last time I left a possibility with you and asked nothing of it. This time I’d like to take one small step further, and only one.
Because if a body can adapt to help, it can also do something else that is harder to appreciate at the time. It can hold back. It can tighten. It can quietly decline to let you use something the way you used to.
None of that arrives feeling like care. It arrives feeling like being stopped.
Think about someone rolling an ankle stepping off a curb. Within a day or two, without deciding anything, she walks differently. She takes the stairs one at a time. She turns her whole body instead of pivoting. She stands with more weight on the other side.
Nobody taught her that. She did not sit down and plan it. Something in her simply began keeping weight off an ankle that had been hurt.
And it is inconvenient. It is slower, it is tiring, and after a week of it her other hip has an opinion too.
But we don’t usually call that walk a malfunction. We can see what it’s for.
What I notice is how differently we treat that same behaviour when it has been going on for years and no one remembers a curb.
Then the guarding is just tightness that won’t release. The hesitation before lifting something is just being careful, or being silly. The shoulder that doesn’t want to go overhead is a shoulder that has failed. The reluctance is read as weakness, or fear, or not trying.
I’d like to leave room for a plainer reading: that some of what feels like your body refusing to cooperate may have begun the way that walk began — as something keeping an area a little safer than it would otherwise be.
Protective doesn’t always feel gentle.
I want to be careful here, because this is the kind of idea that gets stretched much too far.
I am not telling you that all tightness is protection, or that everything you feel has a purpose behind it, or that discomfort is somehow good news in disguise. That would be tidier than the truth, and you have been handed enough tidy explanations.
And nothing here replaces ordinary good sense about your health. Something new, something severe, something changing quickly, something that worries you — that deserves a proper look from someone who can examine you. Please go. This Conversation is about understanding one possible layer of a long story. It is not an explanation for everything, and it was never meant to be a reason to wait.
What changes, when this lands, is usually not the sensation. It’s the tone of voice a person uses about herself.
There is a difference between my back seizes up on me and my back braces. One has an adversary in it. The other has something you might eventually be able to work with.
You don’t have to make that switch today, and you certainly don’t have to feel grateful for anything that hurts. Nobody is asking you to like it.
I’m only suggesting that uncomfortable and protective have never been opposites.
— Tammie
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