September 25

This was a week of pain. All my plans fell apart at the seams, threads unraveling everywhere, fabric unspooling on the floor. I was untethered, unmoored, adrift, bereft. My body hurt, my hip, a pain descending from my back. Every moment, the pain followed and I mostly ignored it. I saw the chiropractor a couple of times and convinced myself it would go away, no problem.

But a month later, it’s a problem.

I was awake half the night, no way to get comfortable. In the middle of the night, I took a muscle relaxer and a melatonin, then laid in bed for hours waiting to return to sleep. When I woke, I was groggy and disoriented, but mostly exhausted. I called the chiropractor again and spent the day weepy. He adjusted me and gave me two days to get better.

Two days later, I was still in pain.

It’s one of those things that happens to other people. Chronic pain. A lingering ailment. I like pain—some of it, anyway—the kind that makes me feel alive because I’ve done something with my body. The pain and soreness a marker of good, hard work. I’m healthy, after all. Maybe carrying a few extra pounds after months of being locked up at home, but generally healthy.

But the pain. It came out of nowhere and stuck around too long.

“I think this is bothering you more than you’re letting on,” my husband told me as I cried to him on the phone. What is happening to me? I kept thinking, ever the drama queen. Everything was dissolving, even my sense of self. What about my goals? What about my writing? What about working out?

Now I wonder what was happening. How did we jump from here to there, from okay to complete panic?

In the midst of my freefall, I pulled out all my art supplies and an old sketchbook. What I needed was to make something. What I needed was a break from writing. Writing can’t hold the full weight of my creativity and shame on me for putting so much pressure on it. Creativity can be anything—the act of creating, the artistry, the nitty gritty of it.

“You need a quick win,” said my husband, working from the kitchen table. He needed space and quiet and a wife who would calm down and figure it out. I went outside to the patio table and spent an hour gluing and painting and cutting like a first grader in art class. It was something, it was nothing. For a few moments, I forgot my pain.

Let me not be heavy handed here. Creativity isn’t a solution for physical ailments. But maybe. Maybe there’s something to the movement of the heart and mind and the movement of the body. I’m not a hand and a foot and a heart and a hip, all disconnected and disorganized.

This is my whole body. This is my whole heart.

I made some mediocre art and felt better. The next morning, I called my doctor and made an appointment.

And, finally, I gave myself something I desperately, desperately needed: hope.