Instead of reviewing a sad thing this month, I am going to share a sad thing about my life. I hope no one minds! lol. Back to bringing you the sad hits of our troubled culture next month.
Sad
I fell again today. I missed a step on the stairs outside my flat and my left ankle went “PEACE✌🏻!”, as it often does, and I found myself dazed, on the ground, palms painfully speckled with rocks and grit, the cab I was waiting for rolling to a stop in front of me. I picked myself up and thought, if I can limp on this sprain then I am getting into that cab. And I could, so I did. I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment I really needed to go to which monitors a different, but probably related, chronic condition. As I hobbled after the doctor at my appointment she looked back at me and said with a grimace, “oh dear, I was just reading in your notes that you’re hyper mobile.”
I have been consistently falling and injuring my lower limb joints for over twenty years now. As a kid I was almost comically uncoordinated and had zero athletic ability or stamina. I was, however, bendy as hell, horrifying visiting relatives with my ability to pull my fingers into nauseating positions, touch my thumb to my forearm, twist my arms behind my back, pull my foot behind my head, and not only sit in a full lotus pose, but also walk and swim in it. As a teen in giant 90s platforms, my friends and I would laugh that I’d occasionally, while standing still, just kind of topple over like a dropped jig doll. When platforms went out of style, I attempted stilettos but soon gave up, my ankles snapping outward at any opportunity. I decided my look would be ballet flats instead. Back then, I could roll an ankle and just keep going, my body too loose, yes, but quick in recovery, supple with youth.
At 19 I went backpacking across Asia for five months. Maybe a week before I left, I ran to answer the doorbell and idk what happened, I didn’t fall, but my knee felt weird. “It will feel better in a few days,” I told myself. I watched friends I travelled with get sick and injured in various, more serious, ways they quickly bounded back from. Why did the knee I’d only slightly tweaked when answering the door bell still hurt? I am a wuss about recreational drugs, but on a Himalayan trek, I sat on a stone wall looking down over a verdant canyon while a friend smoked me out. I was in so much pain and needed to continue walking. Back home, working with a PT, no one could figure out what was up with my knees except that they hyper extended. I wore a brace for awhile and then, unable to tell if it did anything, took it off and threw it away.
I got into yoga. I remember a teacher I had, Jeffrey in Minneapolis, looking down at me with a frown in class once and saying, “you know people can’t usually sit that way without a lot of work.” I felt smug. I did yoga over many years but always felt like a cheat. I knew I had no strength, I knew I wasn’t becoming stronger, I was just bending my way into poses without working very hard. My favorite was bow pose, I felt like I could unhook my hips and shoulders to create a beautiful shape. Hundreds of hours of yoga and I still have never done a single chaturanga (low plank) because I have no upper body strength. But couldn’t I revel in my one and only physical skill, flexibility? “Stop bragging about being flexible,” a male friend told me once, “it just makes guys imagine twisting you up in weird ways to fuck you,” (…..OK!). I fell in yoga but perhaps because I was prepared for it, I never came to any harm in the classroom, the falling never surprised me there. Falling in yoga was play.
I sprained my ankle occasionally throughout my twenties, probably more than is normal, but it was my thirties that became the decade of the sprain. Stepping down a step at a public transport station caused me to crumple onto tram tracks. A slight deviation in flatness of the sidewalk granted me a sprain on the second day of my mom’s visit to Holland. Simply walking down the street one day, for no reason I can discern, my left ankle gave and then my right, resulting in a double sprain so severe I thought I broke a bone and spent six weeks recovering, largely unable to walk. I use a cane off and on depending on what is going on for me in my body.
Finlay, My current PT, who is like the supportive high school football coach I never had, video taped me walking and we watched it together in slow mo. My ankles, which if I have both legs extended can bend so that the soles of my feet are flat together like sandwich halves, flick outward as I move. Their range of movement is so great it’s easier for me to flex around objects in my path than lift my feet high enough to clear them. I don’t really use the balls of my feet, I use the blades. I don’t know when I learned this, probably as I learned to walk. A friend with chronic illness describes life inside a hypermobile body as “surfing your joints”, you are in constant movement and your body tries to find short cuts to help limit your exhaustion and effort. Perhaps this is one of my short cuts.
When was the last time you fell? Like truly ate shit? Here’s what it’s like if you need a refresh: you are up, living life, continuing on a projected path. Then! In the dirt. Like the floor opened up. The moments between standing and falling are swallowed by your own shock and confusion at what the hell is happening. This is not supposed to be! It is incredibly embarrassing, you feel like a fool and hope no one saw, but also that someone did because you might need help. You get covered in grime from the street, hands, clothes, you bruise, smack and strain other body parts that hurt for days. “Do you want me to call 112?” (Dutch 911) a Dutch man asked me the day I fell onto the tram tracks and people had to pull me up onto the platform. “Yes,” I gasped in pain. He smirked at me and walked away, letting me know he didn’t think it was as serious as I was making it out to be. Falling is like life. You never see it coming. Suddenly you are stunned, down on the ground, people making their assumptions.
I know that I will probably keep falling, even as falling becomes more and more dangerous as I age, even though I take it seriously and worry about my mobility and try to do things to prevent it. As a chronically ill person, it is difficult to do all of the things all of the time your body needs to stay functional, in a painful and unfair way, those things often contradict each other. It’s also hard to say to people that you are now injured on top of the 800,000 other things wrong with you (more on that in a minute!) because you worry it makes you seem dramatic, crazy, attention starved. I will say, I believe the work I have done with Finlay prevented this most recent sprain from being as bad as it could have been. All I can do is keep up this work, hopping on the slippery stepping stones of smallish recoverable injury through the rushing currents of serious debilitation.
Famous
I loved this book so much I’m having trouble writing about it except to be like BLAHHHH READ IT! Sarah Polley is probably most famous for the work she did as a child in Baron Munchausen and Road to Avonlea. She won an Oscar this year for best adapted screenplay for Women Talking. She adapted Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace for Netflix, which is great, and I highly recommend a documentary she did about her family called The Stories We Tell. I guess this is all to say I already liked her work going into this collection and my expectations were high. They were met and surpassed!
Alice, Collapsing, the first essay in Polley’s collection is probably the best personal essay I’ve ever read. She says she worked on it for twenty years. It addresses the period in her life when her scoliosis was at its most severe, while she was performing as Alice in Wonderland, a subsequent breakdown she had and how this all fits into her complex relationship with her father. Much of the book covers Polley’s life long struggles with medical trauma and injury, including endometriosis, a severe concussion that lasted for years and a life threatening condition she developed while pregnant with her first child.
Throughout these essays is a refrain of worry about being believed in her illness, and fear (common among chronically ill people, I’d go so far to say) that maybe she’s just making too big a deal out of things. When a doctor tells her she has the worst case of endometriosis that she’s ever seen, Polley replies with, “oh! I thought I was just being a wuss.” She frequently mentions family members who think her physical illness is a mental health problem, that she gets some perverse crazy person’s enjoyment from “malingering.” A broader theme of the book is about believing herself. Her essay The Woman Who Stayed Silent addresses the complications of memory, sexual assault and abuse. It goes deep into the incredible intricacy of trauma, the things we do and say to be able to live our lives and how incompatible that is with the pubic conception, both legal and personal, of who is telling the truth. It totally blew me away and I wanted to give this essay to everyone I’ve ever known.
There’s a couple of essays in there about her experiences as an actor, which I enjoyed because I know her films, but which may be less interesting to those who aren’t familiar with her work. However the book as a whole is so powerful and fascinating, with so many thoughtful essays on issues that are complex to tackle, I really can’t recommend it highly enough. Especially to those of you dealing with illness or trauma in any form.
I’m a huge Lisa Eldridge fan. I think in part because she’s a historian, as am I, with a similar love for sensorial histories such as those of color and scent, and objects of social history such as makeup. She wrote a wonderful book on makeup called Face Paint which goes over the development of pigments used on the skin, color by color. She has an excellent documentary on the BBC, Make up: A Glamorous History, where she makes cosmetics from historical recipes and applies it to models based on research from that historical period. Fascinating! If you’re a nerd like me you’ll love it. Here’s the first episode if you’re outside the UK:
Lisa also has a popular YouTube channel and makeup line. A friend of mine says the magic of watching Lisa Eldrige videos is you can almost feel her putting the makeup on your own face. I think if I was in a make-a-wish type situation, mine just might be having Lisa do my makeup. Anyway! I love her makeup line because she never puts in fragrance and it’s safe for sensitive skin. She’s a collector of historical makeup and her line has a classic look and lovely, heavy feel, especially her bullet lipsticks.
As I’ve had a particularly garbage year, following two absolute garbage years, I’ve been self soothing (as many do) with lipstick. Mine are all from Lisa Eldridge. I am not good at taking pictures but here’s what I own:
Kitten Mischief is a buttery toffee-pink and the color she’s been wearing in all her recent videos, if you want to see it in action. Velvet Dutchess is the darkest red I’ve ever owned. The color reminds me a bit of Chanel Rouge Noir nail polish (the most popular nail color in the world!), like it’s DEEP. It’s a statement.
The Velveteen Liquid Lips are the ones I reach for most often because they are totally weightless and completely matte. I would recommend them to anyone with sensory issues because you can’t feel them once they’re on. Muse is a mauve pink, very wearable, and Fawn is a beige tone— for me they’re my-natural-lip-but-better colors. Ribbon is Lisa’s most well known color, a flattering vivid red. Prob my fave red besides NARS Dragon Girl.
Gloss Embrace I like because they are really glossy and the color is good. I do find them sticky when first applied. I have Gloss Embrace in Cinnebar, a burnt autumnal red and Affair, a light caramel color and the one I wear most. I also have it in Go Lightly which is a girly salmon pink.
Ok! Bye!