Conversation Five

The Place That Hurts May Not Be Where the Story Began

A Conversation about why I sometimes ask about things that seem to have nothing to do with the part of you that hurts.

Last time we noticed that small adjustments often come long before anything gets loud.

I want to follow that thread a little further today, because it leads somewhere that surprises most people the first time they hear it.

If we ever sat down together, there’s a moment you would probably find strange. You would tell me your hip has been aching for two years, and I would nod, and then a few minutes later I would ask you about your ankle. Or about the job you had in your thirties. Or which side you carried your children on.

And a perfectly reasonable thought would cross your mind: I told you it was my hip.

So let me explain what I’m doing, because it isn’t doubt and it isn’t a trick.

I’ve always thought in puzzles. Not the clever kind — the ordinary kind, where you spread the pieces out on a table and look for the ones that belong to the same corner. When someone tells me about their body, that is what I am quietly doing. I’m not looking for what is wrong with you. I’m looking for what has been true of you for a long time.

And the things that turn out to matter are almost never dramatic.

An ankle badly turned at nineteen, walked off in a week, never thought about again. Eleven years standing on a concrete floor. A surgery that healed beautifully and left one side a little more careful than the other. A grandchild who only ever wanted to be carried on the left. A stretch of two or three years so difficult that you barely remember the details, only that you got through it.

None of those are the reason you hurt. I want to say that plainly. They’re simply the other pieces on the table — the ones nobody has ever asked you about, because they weren’t on the form and they weren’t the part that hurts.

A dry stone wall winding over an open meadow in soft morning light

Here is the part I most want you to hear, and I’d like to be careful with it.

Looking wider is not the same as looking away.

You have probably had the experience of mentioning one thing and having someone else steer the conversation somewhere more comfortable for them — to your weight, your stress, your age, your sleep. That isn’t what this is. The place that hurts is real, it is yours, and it stays on the table the entire time.

I’m only saying that a body is one connected thing that has been living one connected life. The place that speaks the loudest is often the place that has been working the hardest — which is a slightly different question from where the trouble first began.

Sometimes those are the same place. Often enough, they aren’t. And when they aren’t, treating only the loud spot can feel like mopping a floor while the tap is still running.

If the place that hurts today wasn’t the beginning of the story, what else might belong on the page?

I’m not asking you to work it out. You are not meant to arrive at an answer, and there is no correct one waiting to be guessed.

I’m asking you to hold the question loosely for a few days, the way you’d hold a name you can’t quite remember. Curiosity does this better than effort. Things tend to surface while you’re doing dishes, not while you’re concentrating.

And if what surfaces is only the winter my father was ill, or those years on the ward, that counts. It belongs on the page too. Bodies don’t keep separate records for what happened to them and what they were living through at the time.

If something does come to you, a few words next to the other notes you’ve been keeping is plenty. Nothing needs explaining, least of all to me.

You have been carrying a story with more in it than anyone has had time to hear. I’d simply like the whole of it on the table before anyone starts drawing conclusions about you.

— Tammie

Another Conversation is being written slowly, and it will be waiting here when it’s ready. Nothing is expected of you between now and then.

The conversation continues whenever you’re ready.

Whenever you’d like company again, the Conversations will be right where you left them.